My colleague, TPM reporter Khaya Himmelman, and I have been very focused over the last several months on covering moments when Donald Trump and his allies tell us how they are going to behave in the fall if Trump loses — or if he appears to be losing in states that would be key to his reelection bid. He’s abiding by the same playbook he followed in 2020, when he laid the rhetorical groundwork for Stop the Steal months before Election Day. It was picked up by only those who were listening. We were, and are, listening. We can see him doing the same thing in real time in 2024.
It’s helpful to have a record of this stuff to point back to, to see how it all adds up. We’ve noted Trump’s vows to Christian voters that they’ll never have to vote again after this election, the RNC filing baseless legal challenges that may undergird cries of voter fraud, the ways in which Trump is using his relationship with Republican leadership to push lies about non-citizens crossing the border to vote for Democrats en masse.
Much of our coverage has focused on how all this talk is playing out in the realm of election administration, tied specifically to actions and remarks that might prompt threats or ignite violence at polling places, putting election administration officials in harms way, or give Trump and his MAGA allies mendacious propaganda to roll out if things don’t go their way.
But in some ways, most of Trump’s recent rhetoric — especially since Vice President Kamala Harris became his opponent — could fall into this election-denialism-prep bucket. It’s not just claims about how the election will be run or baseless theories about the fraud that will occur — it’s everything, from the comical to the appalling, covering everything from her crowd sizes to her identity as a Black woman, all aimed at delegitimizing Harris.
One of his latest claims is the befuddling lie that the Harris campaign is using AI to inflate her crowd sizes — with, I guess, the cooperation of anyone taking photos at her campaign rallies. Washington Post columnist Philip Bump noted that an early propagator of this desperate claim is the guy behind one of the conspiracy theories that spread like wild fire in 2020. It was Dinesh D’Souza who first began “asking questions” about photos of a Harris rally crowd.
Per Bump, who, as far as I can tell, was the first to raise the point that this whole AI crowd-size lie campaign may be another form of election denialism prep:
That D’Souza was at the leading edge of this argument is not surprising. It was D’Souza, you may recall, who produced a feature-length movie arguing without evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen by “mules” who collected and submitted ballots on behalf of Joe Biden. Then, as now, D’Souza’s claims were rooted in a trivial misrepresentation of digital information.
…
Why would Trump and his allies spread a false claim about attendance at a rally that was covered on C-SPAN? In part because many elements of Trump’s base have embraced rejections of basic reality (like the existence of “mules”) for years. In part, it’s confirmation bias, with partisans being more likely to accept false information as true when it supports their preexisting beliefs. But in part, it’s because Trump and his allies are already eagerly raising questions about the reliability of measures of Harris’s support — and by extension, the reliability of the results in November.
It’s a solid point, and continues the work of putting the Trump campaign’s alternate reality into context. In a statement Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) helped place this latest Trumpian crowd size lie in the broader election denialism universe, as well. Here’s Sanders’ statement:
Donald Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. When he claims that “nobody” showed up at a 10,000 person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness. Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses. If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are “fake” and “fraudulent.”
This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about.
This is why we must do everything we can to see that Trump is defeated.
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The why:
Thomas Rid is also author of the excellent book Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, which I know I have linked here before, but it’s good and these are the times.
also: fRIst
Covering the potential for their losing is only half the gag. The other half is justifying the misdeeds of their believers.
If we had real journalists, we would see every Trump interview begin with one of his lies, “her crowd sizes are fake,” and a straightforward question asking Trump why did he lie. If journalists would follow up with simple questions, Trump would be done. Instead, they constantly rewrite and explain what he allegedly meant, instead of simply using his own words and asking why he is sprading lies.
Breaking News NOT: Donald J. Trump is Pathological!
Sanders is not wrong, but it seems evident that Trump can lie about anything and convince a certain large group of people; and further that he will always have a group of loyal henchmen, such as D’Souza, to help him undermine voter confidence.