The Don’s inability to move on from his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 remains the most salient indicator of his severe psychopathology. The most powerful man in the world continues to exhibit the deep fragility of his ego in his quest to rewrite history. After all, shouldn’t he have felt vindicated when he won re-election four years later?
Reports of his demise after the calamity of January 6th were premature as he miraculously rose from the dead. It was an American resurrection story. The savior was back. But his redemption just wasn’t enough. He needed more; he needed to erase the blemish of his loss in 2020. That loss, to of all people, Joe Biden, eats at him like the worm that RFK Jr. claims lived in his brain; it creates an unbearable, tic-like need to change the score after the final whistle to quell an unrelenting humiliation that gnaws at him.
So The Don decided to make a speech to the American people to present evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Never did it dawn on him that people were tired of his whining and obsession, preoccupied as they are with paying for the rising cost of gas and food as a result of tariffs and his terrible decision to go to war with Iran. Never did it dawn on him that major TV networks would refuse to air his malicious attempt to undermine our democracy. (Of course he threatened to sue them!) Even Fox News, who did air it, refused to comment on his claims; in fact, on Fox and Friends, they didn’t mention his speech once during its three hour show. Perhaps having to pay 780 million dollars to Dominion for falsely claiming that their voting machines were rigged made them reluctant partners.
During the speech he assailed our election process using words like: “Deep state.” “Rigged and stolen.” “Conspiring.” “Manipulation.” “Corrupt.” “Fraud.” “Cover up.”
The great savior of free and fair elections stated: “Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
“If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states. And we are committing to fix it, and we are also committing to be working with those states and local jurisdictions to help them fix and patch known technical vulnerabilities before the midterm elections.”
Per usual, The Don is playing the projection game. In this game everything he criticizes is actually what he himself is guilty of. As far as protecting our elections, he has done the exact opposite.
During his 18 months in office, he has installed election deniers in key positions, sought to change the rules to make it harder to cast ballots, seized voting records in a bid to prove his conspiracy theories and purged officials who investigated his efforts to overturn his election defeat six years ago. He has also gutted agencies whose purpose is to ensure safe and fair elections. He has threatened to withdraw federal funds used to secure election results from states that refuse to turn over their voting rolls. The day after his speech Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s new homeland security secretary, picked up Friday where the president left off, threatening jail time for local election officials who dared disobey the administration’s requests.
Thankfully, but to The Don’s chagrin, despite his belief in an all encompassing power, the president doesn’t have control over elections—that power is delegated to the states or to Congress. As a result, most of Trump’s big moves have either been blocked by courts or simply ignored by state and local officials.
Federal judges blocked parts of an executive order that purported to instruct states not to accept mail-in ballots after Election Day and to require proof of citizenship. Judges also ruled against an order that would have established a federal database of voting-age citizens, and then would have tried to force states to use the list to screen votes by blocking the U.S. Postal Service from delivering ballots to anyone not included on it.
His continual claims of fraud and rigged elections are part of a fantasy world. They have been debunked time and time again. He cited selectively declassified documents to make sensational claims about vulnerabilities of the election system, although nothing he revealed proved any outcomes were actually changed. He focused on China as a an actor in changing election results. In fact, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that while China made nascent efforts to influence American opinion during the 2020 election, it largely stayed on the sidelines, while Russia mounted an expansive and aggressive campaign to help Mr. Trump win in 2016. There they go again with the Russia, Russia, Russia thing.
Even the White House website laid his claims to waste: “We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.”
After The Don’s speech, John Solomon, who is leading Mr. Trump’s task force on declassifying documents on a range of issues, told reporters outside the White House that the intelligence community documents show no evidence that votes in election machines were changed in the past three elections.
At the end of his speech, The Don made a desperate plea for “Addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the SAVE America act. The only reason you would not do it is you want to cheat. Because your policies are so bad. And your candidates are so pathetic.” The savior is panicked and needs to be saved by the “Save Act.” His case to the people was as Don Jr. liked to say a “nothing burger.”
It has always struck me as absurd that the same election procedures operating in 2016 and 2024, when he won, somehow were deeply flawed in 2020. Not surprisingly, his followers don’t consider this as it would force them to realize how full of shit this entire fever dream is. The cognitive dissonance it requires to believe the election was rigged in 2020, and not the others, is remarkable and dangerous. That cognitive dissonance is what is behind his supporters ability to compartmentalize his heinous and cruel actions and belief in him despite the fact that he doesn’t give a shit about them.
But the bottom-line of his speech is that no one should think of him as a loser as dark forces are at work to thwart him. The purpose of his speech was to sow doubt that the midterms could be free and fair elections and if his party loses that it is reasonable to believe that it was rigged.
Let’s face it. The Don had the audacity to encourage thousands of believers to attack the Capitol on January 6th, 2025. He seems even more unhinged today. There is no reason to believe he won’t resort to desperate measures, including sending in federal troops to intimidate voters, seizing ballot boxes and declaring the elections invalid. When a man who believes he is a savior finds himself losing favor, all hell can break loose.
The Grand Offal Party 