A method to the madness of King Donald (Updated)

Renée Graham at the Boston Globe has a great line that’s worth repeating: “President Trump never met a conspiracy theory that he wouldn’t spread like manure.” The tinfoil hat presidency (subscription required).

President Trump has spent a significant portion of the past two and a half years soothing his deeply fragile ego by insisting he would have beaten Hillary Clinton in the popular vote if not for rampant voter fraud — for which he offers absolutely no evidence (see the update below).

Bess Levin explains at Vanity Fair, TRUMP, CRANKING THE CRAZY TO 11, SAYS GOOGLE COST HIM “16 MILLION VOTES”:

His argument has typically centered around the repeatedly discredited claim that “millions of people” voted illegally in the 2016 election, which he formed and then disbanded a presidential commission to investigate.

On Monday, though, he proffered a new theory for why Clinton kicked his extremely sensitive ass by nearly 3 million votes:

As is typically the case, no one knows precisely what the president of the United States is talking about. Presumably this tweet is a product of his tendency to pick up various threads of information from unreliable sources, let them rattle around in his head for a bit, and then spit out something incomprehensible to those who don’t speak Trump.

Ah, but we do know —

Seven minutes prior to the tweet, Fox Business aired a segment discussing congressional testimony from psychologist Robert Epstein. In June, Epstein told Ted Cruz that Google’s bias had likely resulted in at least 2.6 million undecideds voting for Clinton, and that in 2020, Big Tech could band together and throw an extra 15 million-odd votes toward whomever the Democratic nominee turns out to be.

As TechCrunch notes, Epstein puts out “anti-Google editorials almost monthly,” and has been attacking the company since 2012, when Google helpfully warned visitors to Epstein’s website that it had been hacked to serve malware to anyone reading it. And, as Mother Jones writes, there’s good reason to ignore not just the president, but the quack whose extremely unscientific work he seemingly attempting to reference on Monday:

…where does Epstein get those numbers? This is a bit murky, but a couple of years ago he published a paper showing that search results can bias decision-making. The limits of the paper are so breathtaking that I’m not sure how you can draw any real-world conclusions from it, but basically he came to the unsurprising conclusion that if you (a) give people a choice of two politicians they’ve never heard of and (b) provide search results that are unanimously positive toward one and negative toward the other, then (c) they’ll tend to support the person who got the positive results. No kidding.

In April, Epstein presented another study in which he argued that Google’s algorithms are biased because their search results are dominated by news from mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, rather than conservative sites like Breitbart. In other words, Epstein’s basis for saying Google is biased is that it gives more weight to legitimate new sources and less to the since abandoned love child of Steve Bannon and erstwhile Trump sugar daddy Robert Mercer.

Using this theory, Epstein tracked “47,300 searches by dozens of undecided voters in the districts of newly elected Democratic Reps. Katie Porter, Harley Rouda and Mike Levin,” and then claimed that an estimated “35,455 voters who were on the fence were persuaded to vote for a Democrat entirely because of the sources Google fed them.”

Yes, people read stories from news outlets that have never had an entire section called “black crime,” and made a decision based on those stories. Or, as Epstein would put it, they were manipulated into voting for a Democrat by Google, a move the site may pull again in 2020.

That’s obvious catnip to our conspiracy theorist president, but most people aren’t buying it, including Hillary Clinton in an epic burn:

Our president is without a doubt mentally and emotionally unstable, and a danger to both himself and to society. Bob Cesca at Salon sees a method to the madness of King Donald. Trump’s outrageous claims of voter fraud have a clear goal: Refusing to accept defeat in 2020:

A brand new Fox News Poll shows Donald Trump well behind the top four Democratic candidates for president, with Joe Biden topping the list at 12 points ahead of Trump.

Trump… is totally losing his shpadoinkle over the poll results.

He’s becoming so unraveled about the prospect of electoral defeat that he’s beginning to establish a pretext, or a series of pretexts, for challenging the results of the election if the polling turns out to be accurate. Primarily, Trump’s looking at voter fraud and social media as skewing the ultimate results in favor of the Democrats. Yes, the new “unskewed polls” guy is the president of the United States.

Those of us who’ve been paying attention know that voter fraud — at least in the sense the Republicans claim to fear — is statistically nonexistent. Consequently, voter ID is a solution looking for a problem. It’s shocking, I know, that Trump would make things up to suit his bizarro-world version of reality. But to be clear, especially for any Red Hats trolls among us today, there is no such thing as in-person voter fraud in America. None. How do we know?

During five of the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice conducted an exhaustive investigation into allegations of voter fraud. During the 2002 and 2004 elections, investigators only managed to pinpoint 26 convictions for actual voter fraud out of 197 million total votes cast. That’s a voter fraud rate of 0.00000013 percent — statistically zero — which no doubt triggers the “Dumb & Dumber” reaction from voter ID zealots: “So you’re telling us there’s a chance …”

But we’re living during an era in which our malignant president and his malignant Republican Party are desperately trying to convince millions of voters that what they’re seeing isn’t happening, and that reality is whatever Donald Trump says it is.

The great irony there, of course, is that Trump has a half-century-long history of fabricating “facts” to fit his own criminal agenda. And now, for around 40 percent of American voters, this obvious flimflam artist is somehow the most trustworthy man in politics. The indoctrinated naiveté would be hilarious if it weren’t so destructive.

Back to the evidence. In case the Ashcroft investigation isn’t good enough for Trump and his Red Hats, let’s take a look at Trump’s own voter fraud commission, formerly led by Kris Kobach.

Perhaps this got lost amid the firehose of news, but Trump and Kobach formed the commission because Trump claimed to believe in a ludicrous conspiracy theory that three million votes in California had been illegally cast in 2016, which might (in a thoroughly imaginary hypothetical realm) have meant he didn’t lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton after all, and might (again, hypothetically) have made the president feel as if his penis weren’t as minuscule as everyone says it is.

After less than a year, the Kobach commission was disbanded after not finding any evidence of voter fraud. Most of us Normals knew that would happen before it even launched, mainly because the commission had nothing to do with actual voter fraud and everything to do with massaging Trump’s brittle ego.

As for the excuse that the commission was stonewalled by the states, one of the commission members, Matthew Dunlap, revealed that, yeah, the investigation wasn’t about voter fraud at all. Dunlap told NPR, “Even though the idea was to investigate voter fraud, it is pretty clear that the purpose of the commission was to actually affirm and validate the president’s claims whether or not we had any evidence of any such voter misconduct.”

Dunlap said the report’s framework was established before the commission even started, suggesting that the results were predetermined. Furthermore, the excuse about state legal challenges, he said, was nonsense: Most federal investigations involve lawsuits and fights over documents and jurisdiction, yet Trump gave up on this one after just eight months. That seems like a hasty exit for such a purportedly serious issue, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, Trump screeched something he overheard on Fox Business the other day about how Google apparently manipulated “2.6 million to 16 million votes” in favor of Hillary Clinton. Of course that isn’t remotely true and he’s lying about this one, too. (See above).

* * *

So once again, Trump’s paranoia turns out to be gobbledygook. Yet it doesn’t have to be on-the-level. As long as it feels to his followers like it could be true, and as long as he continuously screams it at his throngs of brainwashed disciples during his rallies, that will be enough to convince millions of voters and more than a few Republican members of Congress to question the results of the 2020 election if Trump loses. Trump is absolutely capable of pulling a stunt like this. In fact, we should prepare ourselves for the very real possibility that he’ll do it. 

Reminder: Trump previously threatened to do this in 2016, but then unexpectedly won the Electoral College vote, obviating the need to question the election results. Here’s What Donald Trump Says Will Happen If He Loses on Tuesday:

Here’s what Trump actually says will happen if he loses to Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8.

First, he has said the nation could face a messy fight around the election results themselves. Trump declined to promise at the final presidential debate that he would accept the election results regardless of outcome. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” he said. The following day at a rally in Ohio, he elaborated: “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win,” he said.

So in the event of a Trump loss, he’s hinted at challenging the results or calling for a re-count similar to 2000. “If Al Gore or George Bush had agreed three weeks before the election and waived their right to a challenge or a re-count, there would be no Supreme Court case,” Trump argued in Ohio. “In effect, I’m being asked to waive centuries of legal precedent designed to protect the voters.” (TIME’s David Von Drehle explains here why Trump’s comparison to the 2000 election doesn’t hold up.)

Trump surrogate Roger Stone has gone further, saying there will be a “bloodbath” if Democrats “steal” the election. (See Feds Concerned About Risk of Violence as Election Day Nears).

If you do not think that we will see a reprisal of this in 2020, you do not know Donald Trump. He would rather “burn it all down!” than accept defeat graciously. His Red Hat storm troopers are more than capable and ready to engage in violence on his behalf if their “Dear Leader” calls on them to do so. It would be the ultimate act of tyranny.

And don’t forget: If Trump loses, he could face multiple indictments as soon as the new president is inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2021. No one is more aware of that possibility than Trump himself.

There’s another great irony here: It’s the Republicans who have been tampering with elections in plain sight, whether through welcoming Russia’s active measures or by way of voter-roll purges by red-state officials, to say nothing of the massive gerrymandering of congressional districts in numerous states.

And the most pernicious Republican-led manipulation is voter ID itself. Study after study indicates that far more Democratic voters, especially minorities and young people, are blocked from voting by the various ID laws in different states. That’s what’s so Orwellian about all this: The Republican solution to nonexistent voter fraud is to disenfranchise Democratic voters, thus manipulating the results of elections.

To put it another way: The Republican answer to election security is to make elections less secure — see also “Moscow Mitch” McConnell’s refusal to allow a floor vote on any of the myriad bipartisan election security bills jamming up traffic at the door to the Senate chamber. No matter how loudly Trump shrieks about rigged elections, he himself is the ringleader in a conspiracy to do exactly that. No election or any other form of competition will ever be as rigged as a president who refuses to leave office based on debunked conspiracy theories.

The 2020 election is 441 days away, as of the publication of this article. But it’s not too early to plan for Hong Kong-style protests, and to brace ourselves for the possibility that Trump will not go peacefully. His ungainly drumbeat against alleged voter fraud will only grow louder as the election draws closer, while his already precarious grip on reality grows weaker.

UPDATE: Ellen Weintraub, the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, on Monday rebuked President Donald Trump’s repeated allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election as “damaging to our democracy” and wholly unsubstantiated. ‘Facts matter’: FEC chairwoman challenges Trump’s voter fraud claims:

“There is no evidence of rampant voter fraud in 2016 or really in any previous election,” Weintraub, a Democrat, told CNN.

“People have studied this. Academics have studied this. Lawyers have studied this. The government has studied this. Democrats have studied this. Republicans have studied this,” she continued. “And no one can find any evidence of rampant voter fraud either historically or particularly in the 2016 elections.”

In a letter to Trump on Friday, Weintraub challenged Trump “to provide any evidence” that could back up those statements. “To put it in terms a former casino operator should understand: There comes a time when you need to lay your cards on the table or fold,” she wrote.

“Facts matter. And people of America need to be able to believe what their leaders tell them,” Weintraub said Monday.