This is the 14th and last in a series illustrating how Trump’s MAGA movement is the new American fascism. We use a template laid out in an article published in 2003 by historian Lawrence Britt, which analyzed seven fascist regimes and the common threads linking them. You can read last week’s blog here
Week XIV: Fraudulent Elections.
“Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.”
We got to where we are through a massive, sustained and continuing assault on the integrity of the 2020 election. Early in the campaign, Trump vowed that he would not accept the result if he lost—and that is one promise he has kept. Astonishingly, one-third of American voters still believe that the election was either stolen or rigged, despite there being no evidence suggesting fraud altered the outcome. Lawsuits contesting the results have all been unsuccessful, either lost following thorough hearings or dismissed as irrelevant—even by judges chosen by Trump.
As this article points out:
“The myth of the stolen election is a mass conspiracy belief, a type of unverified counter-narrative that questions well-established facts and relies instead on the idea that powerful and malevolent actors are operating in the shadows. What characterizes the United States is not necessarily that its population is more gullible than others, but rather that a large part of its political and media class is willing to accept, exploit, and organize conspiracy thinking for its benefit.”
Conspiracy theories around the 2020 election attempt to justify rule changes for future elections with the goal to ensure Trump never loses an election again. Some of those rule changes are not new: Think back to 2008, when Democrats held a supermajority in the Senate and a renewed majority in the House. In 2010, Republicans seized an opportunity. Recognizing the pivotal role state legislatures played in redistricting, GOP strategists initiated The REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project). With a $30 million investment, they aimed to gain control of state legislative chambers in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida. By winning 117 state legislative races across these states in 2010, they secured the power not only to redraw their own electoral maps—but also to reshape Congress.
The result? In the 2012 elections, Democrats garnered 1.4 million more votes for their House candidates than Republicans did, but the GOP maintained control with a 234-201 majority. This outcome effectively stifled President Barack Obama's second-term agenda in the House even before his reelection. And it set the stage for a decade characterized by deeply anti-majoritarian practices across these states. While some of those gerrymanders have been overturned by the courts, we are still living with the consequences and the intent of REDMAP.
Another GOP tool to gain control? Voter suppression, a tactic that has a long and ugly history in the U.S., and that has enjoyed a resurgence over the last two decades. Though the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed way back when Lyndon Johnson was president, its staying power was tenuous: after the Supreme Court weakened the Act in 2013, many states erected multiple—and effective—obstacles to voting: implementing stringent voter ID laws, reducing voting hours, limiting voter registration and purging voter rolls. In 2023, at least 14 states enacted 17 restrictive voting laws, which have disenfranchised thousands of eligible voters and have disproportionately affected racial minorities, the poor, the young and the old. A recent study of nearly a billion vote records over 14 years shows that the racial voting gap between whites and non-whites, which had narrowed to almost zero in 2008, is now growing again, and is growing almost twice as fast in places that used to be covered by the requirements of the VRA.
And if that doesn’t work? Trump is gearing up a campaign to challenge every element of the 2024 election, in the event that the election is “close.” Step one is to appoint a legal team more rabid, more loyal, more aggressive than the team of disgraced lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis. Trump has already been auditioning conservative attorneys who are willing to help him challenge the 2024 results—including through post-election audits of mail-in ballots.
One of those aggressively loyal attorneys, Cleta Mitchell, an ardent election denier described as “too militant, even for me” by one of Trump’s criminal defense attorneys, is likely first on Trump’s list of election upenders. Mitchell is currently leading a campaign to discredit and dismantle an election security tool called ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center). Until recently, ERIC has been used on a bipartisan basis by 33 states and DC to spot voting irregularities and to identify and reach voters who haven’t yet registered—a group that numbered 4.4 million people in 2022. Once every two years, ERIC requires its participating states to conduct outreach to eligible but unregistered potential voters, offering them information on how they can register to vote—often via postcards. Mitchell told Rolling Stone that ERIC “is a way to accomplish one of the Left’s objectives, and to do so at taxpayer expense: register more people to vote, not removing bad registrations.” Why? Because since there are more of us than them, nothing is more frightening to them than making voter registration easier.
Nine Republican-led States have now left ERIC, including swing states like Virginia, Ohio and Florida. The result is that the most valuable, useful tool we have to strengthen election integrity is being replaced with an untried, untested system heavily promoted by Mitchell called EagleAI. In close elections, its use is likely to lead to increased issues at polling stations, including longer lines and greater need for provisional ballots, which will result in delays in counting overall ballots and determining an unofficial winner. These factors will escalate the potential for chaos and even incitement to violence among election losers.
Should Trump claim victory in 2024, he’ll have a legal team in place to challenge the result—and a compliant Speaker happy to empanel “alternative (fake) electors” to circumvent the Electoral College. Current speaker Mike Johnson was fully prepared to go this route in 2020, but was thwarted by Speaker Pelosi. As Trump says, “Mike is good on elections….”. And, of course, Trump now has a compliant Supreme Court.
So what would come next if Trump were re-elected? The possibilities are horrifying and unAmerican. It’s no surprise that Viktor Orban is in town, meeting Trump at Mar a Lago on March 8th. Orban, who has won four elections since 2010 through use of the gerrymander, control of the courts and suppression of the media has practically written a playbook for his biggest fan, Donald Trump. The ONLY way to beat back this threat is through a crushing defeat of the GOP at the polls in November. It’s on each and every one of us to help turn out an avalanche of voters to the polls, voting for Biden and sending the MAGA movement to where it belongs—extinction. Anything less will lead to an extinction event for the American democratic experiment. Every generation has its test. This is ours. History is watching—and our future is depending on it.
