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News / Opinion / Columns

Estrich: Only contempt for democracy

By Susan Estrich

Published: October 8, 2024, 6:01am

The latest filing by Special Counsel Jack Smith makes clear that Donald Trump and his aides had nothing but contempt for democracy in his efforts in 2020 to subvert the results of a democratic election.

Three days before the election, Person 1, someone who completely matches the biography of Steve Bannon, said that Trump would declare victory despite the actual results of the race. “That doesn’t mean he’s the winner,” Bannon said. “He’s just going to say he’s the winner.”

Which is what he did, and continues to do to this day. Even after all of his frivolous lawsuits challenging the fairness of the election have been thrown out, even when the only remaining suits about the 2020 election are the ones charging Trump and his aides with trying to subvert democracy, Trump clings to his lies and repeats them ad nauseam. As recently as last week’s debate, running mate JD Vance refused to say that Trump lost.

This is how misinformation works. Repeat a lie enough times and some people will believe it is true. So you claim, absolutely baselessly, that Kamala Harris has a mental disability (an insult to people who really do have disabilities) and say it enough times, and some people will believe it. It’s an old trick and a dangerous one.

Back in 1988, Lee Atwater, George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager, put out the story that his opponent Michael Dukakis suffered from serious depression and received psychiatric help, a story that was utterly baseless. When then-President Ronald Reagan gave credence to the story by saying he was not going to attack an “invalid,” everyone ran with the story. What a president, or a former president, says has always been newsworthy, even in the days before social media provided a platform for misinformation. Dukakis’ numbers went down despite his denials.

There is every indication that Trump intends to try to steal this election, as attempted did in 2020. Already, Republican groups have filed some 90 lawsuits, mostly in swing states, embracing theories that were rejected in 2020 and are nonetheless being repeated again. That is reportedly three times as many lawsuits as were filed before the election in 2020.

The Republican National Committee, which largely stayed out of the phony lawsuit game last time, is knee-deep in it for 2024. Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the party, is doing her father-in-law’s bidding. The RNC is devoting more resources to baseless election lawsuits than it is to on-the-ground canvassing.

In Nevada, the RNC brought a lawsuit last month repeating a claim that nearly 4,000 noncitizens voted in the 2020 election, a claim that the state’s top election official, a Republican, flatly rejected. Blaming illegal immigrants, in this case for voting, is a consistent theme of the latest round of lawsuits, notwithstanding the absence of any credible evidence of a pattern of noncitizen voting. But putting it in the form of a lawsuit lends credibility to the lies.

According to Gineen Bresso, who used to be a respectable election lawyer and has since drunk the Trump Kool-Aid, “Our legal efforts are fighting to fix the problems in the system, hold election officials accountable, protect election safeguards and defend the law. While Democrats want a system open to fraud without safeguards, that counts illegal votes, we are committed to securing the election so every legal vote is protected.”

Not exactly. The common theme of the Republican efforts is shrinking the voter rolls of those who are more likely to vote Democratic, whether it is mail-in voters or legal immigrants or even the disabled, and to give local election officials more freedom to refuse to certify the results. Which is exactly what Donald Trump tried and failed at in 2020.

Sadly, the only lesson Trump has learned is to do it again, only with greater vigor this time around. He is, as Bannon said last time, sure to declare victory, and to pursue it in the courts, even if he loses at the ballot box. Only a decisive defeat will stop him and his crew. Indictments were not enough.

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