Trump’s Pattern of Sowing Election Doubt Intensifies in 2024
A false, familiar claim by the former president — that the contest in which he’s participating is “rigged” — has reached a fever pitch in this cycle.
"Former President Donald J. Trump has baselessly and publicly cast doubt about the fairness of the 2024 election about once a day, on average, since he announced his candidacy for president, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
Though the tactic is familiar — Mr. Trump raised the specter of a “rigged” election in the 2016 and 2020 cycles, too — his attempts to undermine the 2024 contest are a significant escalation.
“This is a rigged deal, just as the 2020 election was rigged, and we can’t let them get away with it,” Mr. Trump said on Nov. 18, 2022, three days after announcing his 2024 candidacy. His comments were in response to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s appointment of a special counsel to supervise the Justice Department’s criminal investigations related to the events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot and Mr. Trump’s decision to keep classified documents at his Florida resort.
By last summer, Mr. Trump had honed the language and made it a staple of his stump speech: “They rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.”
The Times has documented more than 500 campaign events, social media posts and interviews during the 2024 cycle in which Mr. Trump falsely accused Democrats or others of trying to “rig,” “cheat,” “steal” or otherwise “influence” the next election — or of having done so in 2020.
Mr. Trump has adapted the specifics of his accusations with each of the three election cycles. But in each case, his pattern of discourse has followed the same contours. He sows doubt about the legitimacy of the election, and then begins to capitalize on that doubt by alluding to not necessarily accepting the election results — unless, of course, he wins.
This rhetorical strategy — heads, I win; tails, you cheated — is a beloved one for Mr. Trump that predates even his time as a presidential candidate. He called the Emmy Awards “a con game” after his television show “The Apprentice” failed to win in 2004 and 2005. And before he officially became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, he began to float the possibility that the primary contest was, as he said, “rigged and boss controlled.”
By May of that year, Mr. Trump spoke plainly about why he had stashed the argument away. “You’ve been hearing me say it’s a rigged system,” he said, “but now I don’t say it anymore because I won.”
