In the upside-down world of Trump

Voting begins, Trump doubles down on the denialism

Yesterday, I was in Pennsylvania for a Republicans for Harris event with the Vice President. It was a beautiful fall day along the banks of the Delaware, the exact site where George Washington and his Continental Army crossed the river in a treacherous storm on Christmas 1776.

The parallels were not lost on me. As I stood there with my fellow Republicans in support of Vice President Harris, it felt like we too are, in some small way, caught in a metaphoric storm. A small troop of conservative rebels fighting against a wannabe autocrat.

Vice President Harris touched on some of these points in her speech. She also mentioned my former boss, Vice President Mike Pence, and reminded everyone that if he hadn’t stood firm in defense of the Constitution on January 6, 2021, we’d be in a much different situation right now.

The insurrection obviously and rightfully gets a lot of attention, but there was so much more to Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and permanently undermine voter confidence. The storming of the Capitol was merely his final play after all of his flimsy (but lawful) legal challenges had already been thrown out of court for lack of evidence, his (unlawful) pressure campaign on state officials to overturn the election results had failed, and Vice President Pence said no mas to his plans to halt congressional certification.

Trump has now taken to calling the debacle that was the 2020 transition “peaceful.” It was not, in fact, peaceful, as anyone with eyes knows. Welcome to Trump’s upside-down world, where you can’t believe your lying eyes.

A case in point is Georgia, where Trump prevailed upon the Secretary of State to "find" votes in 2020. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox yesterday ruled that attempts to change state election rules in a way that would make them more favorable to Trump are “illegal, unconstitutional, and void.” Thank you, Judge Cox. A similar situation just occurred in Nebraska, where Trump allies attempted to change the way the state allocates its Electoral College votes. Thankfully, a brave state Republican stopped that from happening.

It’s all very interesting. Because in 2020, Trump allies argued that state legislation passed to enable the election to take place safely amid the COVID-19 pandemic was illegal and should invalidate the votes in those states. Pennsylvania was one of them. And yet it was the majority-Republican state legislature that approved no-excuse mail-in voting for all registered voters in Pennsylvania in 2019 before the pandemic even happened. 

What the law didn’t do was update the amount of time election officials would have to count the votes, a process that could not begin until Election Day. When the pandemic hit, and an unprecedented increase in mail-in ballots was expected, the Pennsylvania Department of State urged the legislature to change the law to allow pre-canvassing (verifying, opening, and scanning ballots) starting three weeks ahead of Election Day. But state Republicans would only agree to it if they could ban ballot drop boxes. The Democratic governor refused.

So election officials in Pennsylvania had their hands full, and it took days of counting before Biden’s lead in the state became insurmountable and the election was called for him. But on Election Night, when Trump declared victory, he said, “We don't want them to find any ballots at 4 o'clock in the morning and add them to the list,” and later complained about “big, massive dumps” of ballots.

Just like that, the perfectly normal and time-consuming counting of 2.6 million ballots—which by law could not be touched until Election Day—in a very close race looked to millions of Trump supporters like fraud, which I suppose was easier for them to accept than an election loss. Apparently, “finding ballots” was fine by Trump in Georgia though. Go figure.

Georgia, by the way, had massive turnout for early voting this week. Now, all of a sudden, Team Trump is pushing early voting. What do you know? I guess it’s not “fraudulent” anymore.

But that doesn’t mean Trump has given up. We already know he’s setting up another “rigged election” argument, just as he did in 2016 and 2020, in case he loses. This time around, he’s threatening to sue the post office, claiming it might “purposely” lose “hundreds of thousands of ballots.”

The poor post office. Trump made the beleaguered agency a target of his 2020 election fraud campaign too. Remember when he first appointed Louis DeJoy as Postmaster General in June 2020? DeJoy almost immediately implemented significant operational changes, like reducing staff, limiting overtime, removing mailboxes, and decommissioning mail sorting machines, which raised concerns about the USPS’s ability to manage the influx of mail-in ballots. It led Trump to suggest delaying the election altogether. How convenient.

The USPS isn’t Trump’s only target this time around, He and his allies are trying to disenfranchise U.S. military members overseas (yes, you read that right) in a continuation of MAGA Republicans’ efforts to suppress and undermine the vote. Placing new restrictions on early and mail voting, eliminating poll locations and drop boxes, giving partisan state legislatures greater influence over elections, conducting costly post-election sham audits…they’ve all been the result of Trump’s Big Lie and “election integrity” propaganda. And they all make our elections less representative, less free, and less fair.

Another thing that makes the 2024 election a bit more ominous than 2020 is that Team Trump has had time to work on its state infrastructure. Those fake electors from last time? Some of them are actual electors this time. Five of Pennsylvania’s 19 GOP electors are. In other states, fake electors are serving in important election roles: like a member of the state elections commission in Wisconsin or the lieutenant governor of Georgia.

None of us knows what will happen this year. The fact that the race appears extremely tight makes it even less clear. What we do know is that Trump will claim victory no matter what; if the results show that he lost, he’ll call it fraud; and his supporters will buy it hook, line, and sinker.

And if he wins? Shudder the thought. But it would be fascinating in a grotesque way to watch the crew that called the Jan. 6 Capitol attack “legitimate political discourse” and a “tourist visit” suddenly change their view with Vice President Harris in a position to do what Vice President Pence would not.

All par for the course in the upside-down world.

Take care,
Olivia