The Big Lie 2.0 is officially here
Trump’s blatant deception about Kamala Harris’s huge crowds is the formal start of his attempt to steal the 2024 election
The actions of a violent mob of Donald Trump supporters on January 6, 2021 live in infamy, but Trump’s lies about the 2020 election that motivated the attack began long before that day. Now that Vice President Kamala Harris has pulled ahead of him in public opinion surveys, Trump is laying the rhetorical groundwork to try to steal another election by spreading deliberate falsehoods about Harris’s support.
Months before even a single ballot had been cast in 2020, Trump began lying about mail-in voting, repeating debunked Republican claims that mailed ballots were more prone to fraud. Trump very clearly did not believe these assertions since he has voted absentee for years, before and after 2020, but he seems to have seen them as necessary lies given that he trailed future president Joe Biden in almost all state and national surveys throughout the 2020 presidential campaign.
Four years later, as Harris has unleashed historic levels of Democratic enthusiasm after after President Joe Biden endorsed her to run in his stead, Trump is concocting a new lie to explain why he’s losing: fake images made by artificial intelligence software.
Anyone can see that Harris and her new running-mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz are getting enormous crowds everywhere they go, including last Thursday at a rally in Detroit, Michigan. But Trump needs his supporters to think otherwise.
As is usually the case, the disgraced ex-president’s newest hoax originated in the putrid swamps of right-wing social media. Since the start of Harris’s campaign, Trump supporters have been desperately claiming that reports of tens of thousands of people attending Harris events are fabrications. This is an obvious lie that anyone can debunk in minutes by searching on any social media platform. But Trump decided to go with it anyway, in a Sunday rant posted to his failing personal Twitter clone about how Harris had supposedly pulled off a hoax at the Michigan rally:
Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she “A.I.’d” it, and showed a massive “crowd” of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane. She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the “crowd” looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake “crowds” at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING - And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!
As with his 2020 deceptions about absentee balloting, Trump knew he was lying. Like every other presidential candidate, he pays “trackers” to attend every Harris event to file on-the-ground reports. Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee pay millions of dollars a year to opposition research teams to monitor every word spoken by Harris, Walz, and myriad other top Democrats. All of these people, and Trump himself, know that Harris has enormous enthusiasm for her candidacy. Trump’s staff pollster, Tony Fabrizio, predicted in July that Harris was going to pull ahead of Trump.
No one but the most credulous Republican simpleton believes that Kamala Harris is faking her campaign rallies. But Trump needs this lie to lay the groundwork for his future lies, to construct a new alternative reality in which he still is ahead, so that his supporters can help him steal the election while pretending that it was Democrats who cheated.
While Trump’s specific lies against Harris are only just now taking shape, Republican activists have been working tirelessly on deceptively named “election integrity” efforts designed to infiltrate state and local election systems to skew them against Democrats and also to delay and subvert vote counting. Cleta Mitchell, a far-right Christian legal activist, is one of many top Republicans who have been laboring for months to empower spurious lawsuits:
Mitchell has played a key role in leading a coalition of groups that has pushed the false idea that there is a serious threat of non-citizens voting in US elections. Her coalition has supported federal legislation championed by the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and others to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Such a restriction would probably do little to prevent fraud, which is exceedingly rare. Instead, it would probably make it harder for millions of eligible voters to cast a ballot. Nearly one in 10 eligible voters – 21 million Americans – lack easy access to proof of citizenship documents, according to one study released earlier this year.
Even though Johnson’s congressional bill passed the House, it will probably go nowhere in the Senate. But it helps create an impression that something is amiss with American elections. To make matters worse, when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, Republicans also immediately sought to suggest her candidacy was illegitimate, calling the effort a “coup”.
“They’re hanging the hooks to later hang their hat on,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the top voting rights expert at the Brennan Center.
“It’s all part of creating sort of a pretext to say, ‘Oh, we need to throw out this set of ballots’ or ‘We can’t really know who the real winner is,’” said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit Protect Democracy who works on voting rights issues. “I think much of it won’t stick, but I think the point is to have enough of it stick to create enough uncertainty for that critical post-election period.”
Trump is going to try to steal the 2024 election. While his latest crowd size lie seems like nothing but pathetic defensiveness, it is so much worse. This is the Big Lie 2.0. Trump is building the alternative reality that his supporters will move into should Harris prevail in November.
John Bolton, the right-wing Republican who served as Trump’s top national security adviser, described exactly why his former boss behaves this way in a CNN interview last week:
He makes up what he wants to say at any given time. If it happens to comport with what everybody else sees. Well, that’s fine. And if it doesn’t comport with anybody else, he doesn’t really care and he’s had decades of getting away with it. So in his mind, the truth is whatever he wants it to be.
Having evaded the criminal justice system for his failed coup attempt in 2021, Trump is preparing for another one. We must all be prepared in response.
Guessing placing ads on Craigslist for his rallies in 2015 & 2016 was fine though. Folks were paid from $50.00 - $500.00 as he started campaigning.
He claims others do the dirty fake he has done himself. He accuses others of crimes he has been convicted of or awaiting trial for.
He is a dishonest disgusting human being who is completely out of touch with what Americans want and need.
He only cares about Big Business tax cuts and lining his own pockets.
He will be the ruin of this country if he ever gets elected again.