As he peers out at a new political reality, with Vice President Kamala Harris having reversed Democrats’ slide in the race for the White House, former President Donald Trump is rolling out pre-emptive excuses for a possible second defeat. Most are demonstrably false.
Trump has said in recent days that President Joe Biden’s exit from the race, prompted by Democratic concerns that he would lose, is unconstitutional. It is not. The Constitution is silent on party nominations.
He and his allies have accused Harris of generating fake pictures of crowds through the use of artificial intelligence as a means of boosting perceptions of her electoral strength. Her audiences are real.
On Thursday, Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that Judge Juan Merchan — who is due to sentence him next month for felony convictions in New York — is using a partial gag order to prevent him from talking to reporters in the midst of a campaign. The narrow order allows him to speak to the media so long as he doesn’t attack the families of the officers of the court.
For example, Trump spoke to the media at a Florida polling location Wednesday, and last week he held a well-attended news conference at his Mar-a-Lago home.
Trump’s renewed focus on building a false case that Democrats are trying to cheat him — almost four years after his effort to overturn the 2020 election results ended with his supporters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College votes — speaks to his insecurities, according to people familiar with his behavior, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation from the most powerful figure in the Republican Party.
Those insecurities aren’t about election integrity but rather about his chances of winning — and his frustration at not being the center of the national political discussion at all times, these people said. Some Republicans worry that he has once again become distracted from issues important to voters, including inflation and immigration, as he pursues grievances that don’t resonate with swing voters.
“He can’t ever be a loser,” one former senior Trump adviser said of the former president’s push to cast the election as unfair. “He’s just going to do anything he can that he knows gives him attention,” the former adviser said, explaining that Trump views domination of media coverage as a sign of his political strength.
Republican strategists say that Trump is fighting the wrong battle if he wants to recapture the White House.
“Anytime Trump is not focused on issues American are facing and Harris’ failed record — and instead talking about grievances or the last election — the outcome is likely to be the same,” said Stephen Lawson, a Republican operative based in Georgia, where two weeks ago Trump detoured from talking about Harris at a rally to instead attack Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who resisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 results in the state.
Trump advisers say he is not at all worried about the state of the race.
“President Trump and our campaign have never been more confident that we are going to win this election,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a brief telephone interview. “Our strategy in defeating Kamala Harris since she became the Democrat Party’s installed nominee after the coup of Joe Biden has not changed. We will work hard every day to expose Kamala Harris for her dangerously liberal policies that have created an inflation nightmare, a border bloodbath and war around the world.”
Trump has never abandoned his specious claims of election fraud in 2020, a line of argument that plays well with his political base but alienates many voters outside that set. But his fixation on the idea that the system is rigged against him tends to wane when he feels confident about his standing and wax when he is worried.
Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee, which is effectively an arm of the Trump campaign, boasted on X that it had signed up 157,000 people for an “election integrity program.”
“Why is the RNC building out hundreds of thousands of people for an ‘election integrity project’ instead of hundreds of thousands of precinct captains and GOTV [get out the vote] people focused on actually convincing and turning out voters?” said one veteran GOP operative who questioned the strategy. “It’s because it’s much easier to yell ‘rigged’ when he inevitably loses another f—ing winnable race because he has no idea how to make a case for his own vision.”
Polls consistently show a close contest — but Harris is in a distinctly better position to win than Biden was when he stepped aside. In the midst of that abrupt reversal of trajectory, Trump has increasingly turned to casting doubt on the integrity of the election.
“Stuff like this was always going to be a part of the message, but it’s much more central now,” said one Republican operative who is not authorized by his employer to speak publicly about the presidential campaign. “Whether he’s using it to undermine a potential loss or to motivate the base even more, who knows? But undermining trust in institutions is central to everything he does.”
After Trump baselessly said on Truth Social last week that the change Democrats made to the top of their ticket is “unconstitutional,” he explained his thinking at the Mar-a-Lago news conference.
“For a country with a Constitution that we cherish, we cherish this Constitution, to have done it this way is pretty severe, pretty horrible,” Trump said. “And I’m no Biden fan, but I’ll tell you what, from a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you’re looking at, they took the presidency away.”
Though Biden chose not to finish his re-election campaign, he remains president for a term that ends Jan. 20.
In an X Spaces conversation with billionaire Elon Musk this week, Trump repeated his false assertion that the 2020 election was “rigged” and accused Democrats of trying to steal this election because he has been prosecuted in federal and state courts. A New York jury convicted him earlier this year on nearly three dozen counts of falsifying business records to cover up an alleged affair in order to help his electoral hopes. Trump denies that he had a sexual liaison with adult film actor Stormy Daniels and pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Trump advisers note that he has spoken about his differences with Harris on substantive issues — such as energy policy, immigration and inflation — in recent days, including at a rally in Asheville, North Carolina, on Thursday.
But Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist who works in New Hampshire and Washington, D.C., said Trump risks reminding voters who cast ballots against him four years ago of what they didn’t like about him when he mixes in false claims of fraud.
“Fictitious personal grievances do not play well on the campaign trail,” Bartlett said. “Telling voters who voted against you in 2020 that the election was stolen is not a welcome-back message. It was political poison in the midterms and could be political suicide for Trump in the general election.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
