Trump would love to steal the election. But he's floundering.

Republicans would rather talk about almost anything else than his conspiracy theories.

Paul Waldman

Whenever Donald Trump does something alarming, disturbing, or seemingly ill-considered, his opponents immediately begin trading theories about what his true motivations are.

Is today’s crazy statement or decision just a ruse to distract the public from something else, probably Jeffrey Epstein? Is he laying the groundwork for future actions that are even worse?

The assumption underlying this kind of speculation is that when Trump seems at his most deranged, he actually has a plan. But these days, when it comes to the only subject that occupies Trump’s mind as much as his ballroom or the Reflecting Pool — his obsession with phantom voter fraud — we should stop looking for the hidden strategy. Because there is none.

Last week’s speech revealed Trump’s impotence

In advance of the primetime address he delivered last Thursday, Trump went through the usual motions, promoting it as an earth-shaking speech that would alter the American political landscape.

“It doesn’t get bigger,” he said beforehand. “It’s going to be a very big announcement.” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt tried to tamp down speculation about the content of the speech while heightening the dramatic tension, saying “nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in.”

But nobody was fooled.

Just as there are only so many times you can hear Trump say “It’s like nothing anyone has seen before” before the hyperbole loses all meaning, yet another allegation that elections are being stolen no longer registers as revelatory or urgent. That’s especially true when Republicans have worked so hard for so many years to prove that voter fraud is organized and widespread, with an enormous amount of time, effort, and money spent by the entire conservative movement, yet have come up with essentially nothing.

Everyone knew what Trump would deliver — some lies, some innuendo, some banal facts portrayed as deeply sinister. And no one was less enthusiastic about the speech than the Republicans actually trying to win elections this November.

“The people I talk to are scared shitless,” one unnamed former Trump administration official told Politico in advance of the speech. Trump’s 2020 obsession only served to remind voters that the president is unconcerned about the genuine problems they face.

The lack of support from the conservative propaganda machine was obvious in the response afterward. One might expect a dramatic White House address to be followed by a push to spread its message and multiply its effect — GOP candidates for office touting its importance, segment after segment on Fox News about it — but instead there was a deafening silence.

Fox could barely bring itself to discuss the speech afterward, mentioning it briefly on a couple of shows before moving on to more urgent culture war subjects like whether Caitlin Clark is being targeted for hard fouls by Black players.

“The unkindest cut came the next morning from Fox & Friends, long Trump’s media home and favorite program,” reported Media Matters’ Matt Gertz, “which did not discuss the speech at all — not even in a news brief.”

They know something Trump doesn’t: This isn’t helping him. In fact, it would be just about the worst strategy he could have come up with, if there were a strategy at all.

Yes, he’s still trying to steal the election

One could argue that complaining about 2020 had a strategic purpose between then and 2024 — to maintain Trump’s legitimacy within the Republican Party so he could become its nominee again, and justify his attempts to overturn the election that culminated in the January 6 insurrection. But what purpose does it serve today, apart from massaging his wounded ego?

That is the real driver behind his ongoing 2020 obsession: It’s about him, not about any future election or the interests of the Republican Party. And much of the federal government’s time and attention is organized around turning Trump’s personal bugaboos into government policy, whether it’s prosecuting those who have insulted him, waging a war on wind power, or taxing American consumers through tariffs.

It’s important, however, to distinguish between the practical steps the administration is taking to suppress votes and make election administration more difficult, and Trump’s efforts to convince the public that voter fraud is an ongoing crisis. The common explanation for his rhetoric is that Trump is “laying the groundwork” for some kind of all-out assault on the November elections — but that assumes that he is actually persuading anyone that whatever he might be planning would be justified, and when it happens the public won’t object.

Or to put a more benign gloss on things, Trump may just want to keep his base riled up and convinced of its own victimization. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans may still believe that Trump won the 2020 election. But so what? Any Trump voter who’s still mad about 2020 is probably going to vote anyway; what Republicans need to stave off disaster is to turn out not the MAGA-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists but the casual Trump voters, the ones who voted for him in 2016 and 2024 because they hoped he’d be good for the economy.

What Trump doesn’t appear to see, but other Republicans do, is that repeating over and over that the system is rigged may actually demobilize Republican voters. If you believed Trump that every election is a scam, what would be the point in voting? Especially when he himself is not on the ballot. At the same time, the rhetoric can mobilize Democrats, increasing their disgust with Trump and their desire to strike a blow against him.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration is taking practical steps in response to Trump’s personal fixations, including the lie that huge numbers of non-citizens are voting and his hatred of mail voting. Some of them, like the release of the kind of raw intelligence information he touted in his speech last week, are fundamentally propagandistic. Others, like FEMA threatening to withhold terrorism prevention funds from states that don’t change voting procedures, or the Postal Service threatening not to deliver mail ballots in states that have declined to provide voter data to the administration, could have an impact — but so far they are only threats.

Trump is thwarted by decentralization

Such actions keep running into the same problem: American elections are designed to be administered by states and localities, not the federal government. Our election system is actually thousands of separate systems, hopefully operating in concert but without centralized control.

That system isn’t particularly efficient, but in the same way that it makes it difficult for foreign adversaries to hack an American election, it makes it hard for a president with authoritarian ambitions to seize control of them. Which is why courts keep striking down the Trump administration’s attempts to strong-arm states into doing what it wants.

The administration faces another problem, too: It’s run by a bunch of incompetents forced to react to Trump’s irrational whims. So for instance, Kash Patel assigned a remarkable 260 FBI agents to pore over election records from 2020 in Fulton County, Georgia, where ballots have been counted, recounted, and audited, and showed every time that Trump lost. They won’t find what Trump is looking for, but because he continues to be obsessed with the idea that the Republican governor and Republican secretary of state there allowed the election to be stolen from him, the government has to waste its time and resources chasing his delusions.

The most profound danger Trump poses for this election is not what he has done so far, but that right around the election — just before, during or after — he would take far more radical steps. He could, for instance, order his army of ICE and Border Patrol thugs to storm into vote counting centers in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Phoenix, seizing ballots and beating any election officials who got in their way, so Trump could then declare that it was all fraudulent and Republicans are the true winners of every election.

There’s no doubt that he’d like to do that, but his freedom to do so depends on how much support he can get from his party and the public at large. If the point of things like the speech he gave last week is to convince the public that the election system is so deeply corrupted that it’s okay for Trump to take it over by force, he won’t succeed.

That’s apparent to anyone who watched the speech. Not only did it contain nothing but the same old collection of lies and complaints, but when Trump tried to introduce supposedly new information, he was incoherent. Here was his summary of China’s supposed meddling in the 2020 election: “In mid-2019, the Chinese government’s strategy against the United States was focused on undermining domestic confidence in the U.S. president. They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually your president has done a great job and they did everything possible to do exactly that.”

Umm … what?

There was a point late in Joe Biden’s term in office when Democrats came to realize that whatever the accomplishments of his presidency, he was no longer capable of being an effective spokesperson for his own cause. He couldn’t persuade people that his achievements were meaningful, that a new proposal would be worthwhile, or that his opponents were dangerous; his communication skills had deteriorated so much that there was a yawning void where the bully pulpit used to be.

Donald Trump has reached that same point. He can still command attention, but he can no longer convince anyone who isn’t part of his cult of anything — not that the Iran war is a great victory, not that the economy is better than ever, not that we’re respected around the world, and not that when Republicans lose this election, it was stolen from them. And the fact that he has lost whatever power of persuasion he once had will go a long way to keep the election safe from his attempts to undermine it.

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