MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump has never stopped propagating falsehoods that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. But now, he is increasingly turning his attention to pre-emptive claims the 2024 election is being rigged to prevent him from returning to the White House.
This year, Trump and his campaign have cited more than a dozen examples of so-called election interference activities by Americans to claim the coming election is being unfairly manipulated. But as general election voting begins around the country, the campaign has provided no evidence of actual cheating and no specific allegations related to potentially illegal efforts by Americans to tamper with this fall’s election proceedings.
“The Democrat Party is guilty of the Worst Election Interference in American History,” Trump wrote Wednesday on social media after the judge overseeing his federal election interference case in Washington released a redacted filing from special counsel Jack Smith. Trump went on to call the release “another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to…INTERFERE IN THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.”
There is no evidence of wrongdoing by the judge or by prosecutors in the case in the latest instance of Trump’s flippantly and without evidence alleging “election interference” by perceived foes.
Earlier this week, the subject of his ire was the Secret Service.
“I’m so angry about it, because what they’re doing is interfering in the election,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Nation, speaking about the Secret Service’s informing his campaign that it did not have enough resources to secure an outdoor rally for him over the weekend. His campaign team instead planned an indoor event.
“It’s like a form of election interference when they tell you, ‘You can’t have enough people to guard yourself,’” Trump repeated Tuesday during a campaign stop. The Secret Service said the security requirements for the United Nations General Assembly in New York, which played host to many foreign leaders last week, limited its staffing for that specific request from the Trump campaign.
Last week, Trump posted without evidence on his social media account that Google is engaged in “blatant interference of elections” — the second time he has recently claimed that it is trying to illegally alter the White House race.
Trump claimed in the post that Google manipulated its systems to reveal “bad stories” about him and “good stories” about Vice President Kamala Harris. He said he would “request” the prosecution of Google at the “maximum levels” for what he called “illegal activity,” though neither he nor his campaign offered any specific allegation of criminal conduct.
Trump also baselessly accused Democrats last week of intending to use a decades-old law that allows Americans living overseas to vote by mail in order to “cheat.”
And he also falsely claimed in August that Harris posted artificial intelligence-created images of her rallies, writing on social media: “She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.” The photos Harris posted were not fake.
Trump’s campaign did not provide a response to questions about his repeated use of the “election interference” label.
The U.S. intelligence community has publicly warned that foreign actors, specifically Iran, China and Russia, are actively trying to interfere with the race for the White House and to influence American voters. Last week, the Justice Department charged three Iranian nationals with hacking into the accounts of people affiliated with Trump’s campaign and then disseminating breached material.
Trump proclaimed that Harris should “resign” because people in her campaign were sent some of the hacked material. There is no evidence that people in the Harris campaign actually saw or used the hacked material — contrary to the way Trump and his campaign team used hacked Democratic emails and files in 2016 to attack Hillary Clinton.
Despite a litany of insinuations or direct accusations of wrongdoing, there is no basis for Trump’s assertions that domestic actors are illegally altering the dynamics of the 2024 race.
Since he left the White House in 2021, Trump has co-opted the phrase “election interference,” a term first used widely to describe Russia-backed hacks of Democratic officials’ email accounts in 2016, part of a bid to harm Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Eight years later, Trump’s campaign has worked to change and broaden the use of the term. Campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes questioned last month whether the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates was “a political decision to interfere with the election.”
Separately, one of Trump’s campaign spokespeople, Steven Cheung, asserted that the forthcoming release of the movie “The Apprentice” constitutes “election interference by Hollywood elites right before November” because it depicts Trump’s early life in business in an unflattering light.
Trump has also labeled each of the criminal indictments against him — as well as the New York civil fraud ruling against him and his business and the findings by juries in the E. Jean Carroll defamation proceedings — as election interference. He has also assailed as election interference the three gag orders issued by three different judges — which, in part, restrict his ability to attack the staffs of each court.
Trump has also asserted that the “Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from” President Joe Biden by Harris, suggesting it was an illegal “coup” to replace him atop the Democratic ticket. Biden stepped down as a presidential candidate in July and immediately endorsed Harris, after which she became the Democratic nominee.
Cheung, the spokesman, also this summer accused Amazon of “BIG TECH ELECTION INTERFERENCE” when its Alexa systems were found to provide responses to questions about why Harris is qualified for president but no responses for such questions about Trump. Amazon said in a statement that it was an unintentional internal error of its AI systems and that it was fixing the issue.
Echoes of Trump’s past unfounded claims
In addition to the specific attacks he has leveled, Trump has repeatedly and baselessly said an election loss in November would be due to Democratic “cheating.”
“Our primary focus is not to get out the vote — it’s to make sure they don’t cheat, because we have all the votes you need,” Trump told a crowd in North Carolina in August.
He has suggested in recent weeks that Democrats are trying to “stuff” undocumented immigrants into the voter rolls and will then be “stuffing the boxes” full of illegal ballots in the election.
It’s part of an extensive pattern of false election-rigging claims from Trump — beyond his well-documented lies about the 2020 election.
In 2012, he tweeted with no substantive basis that there were “reports of voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama. Pay close attention to the machines, don’t let your vote be stolen.”
Four years later, after he lost the Iowa caucuses to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, then a GOP primary rival, he claimed that Cruz “didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.” (Cruz responded, “Yet another #Trumpertantrum… @realDonaldTrump very angry w/the people of Iowa. They actually looked at his record.”)
Then, after having just narrowly won the presidency but lost the popular vote to Clinton, Trump claimed that he had actually gotten more total votes “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He launched a commission from the White House in 2017 to examine voter fraud. That and other investigations have not found evidence of anything more than rare, sporadic voter fraud.
During the 2018 midterms, Trump questioned the legitimacy of Arizona’s Senate results and raised the prospect that there should be a “new election.” In 2022, he called for a new presidential election “immediately” to redo the 2020 contest.
Over the years, Trump has conceptualized even grander conspiracy theories about American elections, suggesting on multiple occasions over the last year that he even won California in 2020 — even though he actually lost by more than 5 million votes to Biden. A Republican has not carried California in a presidential election — or come even close there — since 1988.
“If Jesus came down and was the voter counter, I would win California,” Trump told “Dr. Phil” McGraw in an interview last month.
Trump’s post-election moves
Unlike in the weeks after the 2020 election, Trump will not be able to use the levers of the federal government to try to overturn an election defeat in November. Allies who ran for secretary of state and governor in a number of key battleground states in 2022 also lost.
The Republican National Committee committed this election cycle to invest more in lawsuits ahead of November to ensure “election integrity,” filing several legal cases in multiple battleground states. The Harris campaign has contended to NBC News that each lawsuit is actually “a brick in the foundation of an argument that they will make in November to say that the election is rigged.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., did not outright commit last week to certify the election results when Congress convenes on Jan. 6. He was among the 139 GOP House members who objected to the 2020 election certification.
“Well, of course — if we have a free, fair and safe election, we’re going to follow the Constitution,” Johnson said in response to a reporter’s question about whether he committed to observe regular order in the certification process.
Last year, Biden and Congress enacted the Electoral Count Reform Act, which narrows the basis on which a member of Congress can even initiate an objection — a potential hurdle for those who could seek to hold up the certification process after a future election.
