The ostensible point of Donald Trump’s campaign rally on Saturday night was to support Max Miller, a former White House aide who’s running against Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio) in a primary next year. Gonzalez was one of 10 House Republicans to vote to hold Trump accountable for his actions on Jan. 6, and the former president is eager to exact revenge.
But to think Trump would headline a campaign event and focus on someone else’s candidacy is to forget everything we know about him. As the Associated Press noted, the former president predictably spent much of his rambling remarks targeting the nation’s democratic foundations.
“This was the scam of the century and this was the crime of the century,” Trump told a crowd of thousands at Ohio’s Lorain County Fairgrounds, not far from Cleveland…. “The 2020 presidential election was rigged,” he told the crowd, which at one point broke into a “Trump won!” chant. “We won that election in a landslide.” In reality, President Joe Biden’s victory was thoroughly validated by the officials who reported finding no systemic fraud.
Such remarks are not simply an attack on Biden’s presidency; they’re part of an ongoing attack against democracy itself. A failed former president, having been roundly rejected by his own country’s electorate, has decided to target public confidence in the United States’ electoral system to advance his ego and ambitions. His plan has been unsubtle for months: Trump expects his followers to believe that there was a mysterious and systemic crime, orchestrated across several states, that has put an illegitimate pretender in the White House.
The rightful president, Trump wants people to believe, is the one who lost the election.
It was in the same remarks, however, that the Republican added, “I’m the one that’s trying to save American democracy.”
It’s easy to roll one’s eyes in response to such ugly nonsense. For an unhinged politician to simultaneously undermine democracy while falsely claiming he’s trying to save democracy is obviously insane.
The fact that the contradiction is becoming the new norm in Trump Land only adds insult to injury.
But let’s not brush past the twisted rationale behind the former president’s pitch: Trump sees himself as democracy’s champion because he’s convinced himself his defeat was illegitimate. And if he secretly won the election he lost, then Trump must be seen as the one who’s “trying to save American democracy” by bringing attention to the alternate reality in which he, and not the rightful president, was the people’s choice.
It’s an argument rooted in the idea that democracy is whatever Donald Trump says it is. Don’t trust election results; don’t trust election officials; don’t trust recounts; don’t trust the White House; don’t trust journalists; and don’t trust other Republicans who resist the Big Lie.
Instead, trust Trump — who will tell you who and what to believe about who did and did not win elections.
“Just remember: What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” he said three years ago next month. It’s a maxim to which the former president continues to cling.
