Never lose track of the fact that President Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting are an attack on voting, full stop. No legitimate president would ever engage in a full-on disinformation campaign to convince Americans to fear that their votes won’t be counted, or that they can’t trust the outcome of an election. In this way, his attacks on voting are in fact disqualifying attacks on his own re-election campaign and legitimacy. As many political observers have argued, he is clearly trying to cast doubt on the presidential election so as to illicitly claim victory before all the votes are counted. He would not be doing this if he thought he’d win in November. He expects to lose, and so is already deploying propaganda and the power of the executive branch to seize power illegally. This plan is in plain view; the fake fears about mail-in voting are pure propaganda, unsupported by evidence. The true fear, which is right out front, is that vote by mail, and voting in general, actually work. The president already learned this lesson in a way few presidents do, by losing the popular vote in 2016 while squeaking out an electoral college victory.
There is really no overstating how destructive this presidential strategy is for our country, beyond the obvious one of a criminal president cheating his way to “reelection.” As Jennifer Rubin reminds us, many in the Republican Party fear that the president’s war on vote-by-mail will hurt the GOP in elections across the country by suppressing the Republican vote. Though this might superficially seem like good news for Democrats, it is still in service of the president’s obsessive interest in retaining power by muddling the outcome of the vote. As Rubin writes, “It seems, however, that he does not care whether Republicans lose; instead, he cares about constructing a narrative in which he can undermine the results and claim to have had the election stolen.”
But it is easy to see that the same arguments the president would use to claim victory in an election he lost could also be deployed by members of the GOP who also lost their elections. In fact, these GOP politicians would have a tremendous incentive to do so, both in order to bolster the president’s fraudulent claims to power and their own chances of holding on to office. In other words, Donald Trump’s war on voting has an internal logic whereby his entire party has an incentive to call into doubt an election the party is generally likely to lose — a loss they will have made all the more likely by having embraced the president’s campaign against vote-by-mail.
Efforts to delegitimize legitimate votes can only have the effect of spreading chaos and uncertainty as to outcomes, and creating a situation where those who hold power — like the president — can simply refuse to relinquish it, no matter what the election results. This is the president’s end game, and any Republicans unwilling to repudiate his strategy make themselves party to his war on self-government.
Faced with the president’s clearly-signaled strategy, Democrats, Republicans of good faith, and other defenders of democracy need to insist on the basic principles of our democracy, without compromise. We must be absolutely committed to clear rules of voting, the most basic of which is that each person’s vote must count. Such commitment, among other things, will highlight how far the president and his supporters have strayed from the basics of American government. Propaganda and disinformation do not determine who gets elected; our votes do.