At a White House event ostensibly focused on immigrant crime, Donald Trump did what he nearly always does: The president peddled election conspiracy theories, pretended he won the 2020 race that he lost and falsely accused Democrats of cheating. The Republican did, however, add an ugly new twist to his usual pitch.
For the first time, Trump told the families of people killed by undocumented immigrants that their loved ones would still be alive if the 2020 race hadn’t been “rigged.”
By any fair standard of decency, the rhetoric was abhorrent, and no leader of any character would try to exploit grieving families’ pain to advance conspiratorial lies. Trump did it anyway.
The president did not, however, offer any evidence to support his nonsensical claims. Despite years of palaver, he’s never presented anything to bolster his assertions related to his 2020 defeat.
That said, it’s important to emphasize that Trump’s Justice Department is making a diligent effort to find the evidence that would tell the president what he wants to hear. It’s also important to emphasize that the search isn’t going well. The Washington Post reported:
The Justice Department has struggled to meet White House demands to prosecute noncitizen voters as conspiracy theories that President Donald Trump and his allies have pushed in public fail to hold up legally.
The president has grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of results, advisers said, leading to his public pronouncements about nationalizing elections and requiring voter ID, which he lacks the authority to do unilaterally.
According to the Post’s reporting, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, leading DOJ officials have met regularly with officials from Homeland Security Investigations, the law enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security that works with prosecutors to bring cases against undocumented immigrants, about tracking down instances of voter fraud. To the surprise of no one, a member of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s team has participated in the conversations.
“The efforts so far haven’t yielded results,” the Post added.
Well, no, of course not. Those chasing mirages inevitably fail.
This isn’t complicated. After Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, he directed his team to uncover evidence of widespread voter fraud, which he assumed existed. Administration officials invested a lot of time, energy and resources in trying to prove Trump right, but they came up empty.
Four years later, after Trump lost the 2020 election, he asked his campaign team to produce evidence to bolster his conspiracy theories, and they failed. Soon after, he hired the Berkeley Research Group to uncover widespread voter fraud and election irregularities, which also did not go well, and then he hired Simpatico Software Systems, which also failed to deliver his fantasies into reality.
More than five years later, the president, still operating from the assumption that his baseless ideas must have merit, because he says so, expects the DOJ and DHS to fill in the gaps and to expose the evidence of corruption he believes must exist somewhere.
But they’re failing for the most obvious of reasons: They’re looking for something that doesn’t exist.
It’s the same problem plaguing the DOJ’s investigation into Biden-era weaponization: Members of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “Weaponization Working Group” are struggling to expose an elaborate “deep state” scheme, despite their extensive efforts, because there’s nothing to find. Such events didn’t happen.
Extensive voter fraud in the 2020 race didn’t happen, either.
Trump’s DOJ can (and likely will) continue to burrow deeper down these rabbit holes, but the sooner officials realize that they’ve been tasked with uncovering a conspiracy that only exists in the imaginations of misguided partisans, the better off everyone will be.
