Four weeks ago, Donald Trump briefly floated the idea of canceling future U.S. elections. Three weeks ago, the president told Reuters that he’s so impressed with himself and his record that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
This week, however, has been qualitatively worse — and more alarming.
On Monday, the Republican endorsed a radical and unconstitutional power-grab, insisting, “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” A day later, when the White House tried to assure the public that he didn’t mean what he clearly said, Trump cut off his own team at the knees and doubled down, insisting a federal takeover of elections could be warranted because of widespread voting fraud that exists only in his overactive imagination.
On Wednesday, as part of a lengthy interview with NBC News anchor Tom Llamas, Trump came out with all kinds of related comments, suggesting again he’s interested in nationalizing U.S. elections, falsely claiming that he won the 2020 race that he lost, baselessly accusing Democratic-run cities of voter fraud (despite having no evidence whatsoever) and concluding that he’ll only accept the results of the 2026 midterms “if the elections are honest” — failing to note that he considers himself the sole arbiter of electoral honesty.
But of particular interest was the president’s concerns about alleged international interference.
Last week, for example, Trump used his social media platform to promote an “Italygate” missive that alleged Italian military satellites were secretly used to hack into U.S. voting machines to flip votes and cause Trump’s defeat. (TPM described this as “2020’s most insane conspiracy theory.”) This week, the president conceded to Llamas that he did amplify the message online.
And then he kept going down the same mind-numbing path.
First he claimed that Fulton County, Georgia, has been “under investigation for four years” — pointing to a probe that does not exist in reality. Then, when asked why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard participated in the FBI raid, Trump said, “I don’t know, but, you know, a lot of the cheating comes from, it’s international cheating.”
On Thursday morning at a prayer breakfast, he made related comments after pointing to Gabbard, who was in attendance. Referring to the 2020 race, the president added, “Let’s assume Russia had something to do with it. You can add China and about five other countries.”
Oh my.
A couple of weeks after Trump lost his 2020 re-election bid, his hapless lawyers held a bewildering event at the Republican National Committee headquarters, where they tried to describe a secret plot that only they were aware of.
The legal team pitched a hysterical tale involving George Soros, “communist money,” the Clinton Foundation, antifa, Cuba and possibly China. Rudy Giuliani and his colleagues also pointed the finger at Venezuela and its former president, Hugo Chávez, who’d died seven years earlier.
At the time, the absurdities became the subject of widespread ridicule and made it abundantly clear that Trump’s lawyers had no credible evidence to support their election conspiracy theories.
But more than a half-decade later, Trump is still swimming in the same ridiculous waters.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, explained last week that if Gabbard and her U.S. intelligence colleagues have reason to believe foreign actors interfered with the 2020 election, they have an obligation to share those concerns with Congress.
Since that has not happened, it appears that Trump’s nonsensical election conspiracy theories are reaching new depths of absurdity.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
