Donald Trump is telling supporters he already has November’s election in the bag and that the only way he can lose is if the Democrats “cheat,” raising alarms about the prospect of another Jan. 6-like event fueled by election subversion.
“Our primary focus is not to get out the vote. It’s to make sure they don’t cheat. Because we have all the votes we need,” Trump claimed Wednesday at a rally in the battleground state of Arizona, whose electoral results he sought to toss out in 2020 based on false claims of widespread fraud.
If the thought of another insurrection sounds alarmist, consider what happened four years ago. Months before the 2020 election, Trump warned that it would be “rigged.” In December, days after the Electoral College cast its ballots for Democrat Joe Biden, Trump announced a “wild” protest on Jan. 6, and his allies launched the “Stop the Steal” movement, promoting false claims and conspiracy theories asserting the election was stolen by means of rigged voting machines and fraudulent ballot-stuffing.
Washington officials and law enforcement will be on high alert this time around, so another deadly riot breaking out at the U.S. Capitol doesn’t seem likely. But that doesn’t mean the threat of more violence is zero.
Trump and his GOP allies have been preemptively blaming an election loss on undocumented immigrants — and suggesting the only thing that can stop them from throwing the election to Democrats is new legislation restricting noncitizen voting, even though it’s already illegal and rarely happens, and even though there is no chance of such legislation becoming law.
“There is currently an unprecedented and a clear and present danger to the integrity of our election system, and that is the threat of noncitizens and illegal aliens voting in our elections,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in May at a press conference in front of the House steps that had been stormed by Trump’s mob.
Asked for evidence of fraud, Johnson had none but said he knew “intuitively” the threat was real.
“That’s all it takes. He’s planting the seeds, and it’s scary and dangerous.”
– Former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn
Republicans have been busy filing preemptive lawsuits and making changes to election rules that could increase the chances of a disputed outcome. In Georgia, a crucial swing state, the Republican-controlled election board this week empowered county election officials, most of whom are partisan appointees, to launch inquiries into election results, potentially sowing doubt and delaying a winner being called.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who led the House Jan. 6 Committee, warned this week that Trump is “plotting again” to deny the election results.
“His campaign proclaims elections won’t end until the moment of inauguration — ‘We will win or it was rigged. We win or else.’ This is Donald Trump’s America,” Thompson said in a speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn told HuffPost over the phone that Trump is “planting the seeds of doubt already, and that’s all it took for Jan 6. to happen.”
“Even if it’s just a small percentage of [Trump supporters], that’s all it takes. He’s planting the seeds, and it’s scary and dangerous,” he said.
Dunn said he was “100%” confident the Capitol Police would be adequately prepared for next Jan. 6, when Congress certifies the results, and that Biden would respond with additional security in case of trouble, unlike Trump, who stewed in the Oval Office during the riot and ignored pleas for help.
“I can’t imagine needs not being met, I can’t imagine that happening — but that doesn’t mean they won’t try,” he added.
Kent Nishimura via Getty Images
It’s not just Democrats sounding the alarm. J. Michael Luttig, a Republican and former federal judge, warned this month that his party has “literally taken America political hostage, threatening the Nation with the specter of another January 6, 2021 on January 6, 2025, if the former president again loses his campaign for the presidency by a vote of the American People.”
The conservative legal scholar called Trump a threat to democracy and said he’s deeply unfit for office.
But there are some reasons to doubt that this coming January could see a repeat of the events that transpired four years ago.
For one, nearly 1,500 Trump supporters have been charged with crimes for attacking the Capitol, and hundreds of them are already in prison, so they won’t be available for a trip to Washington. And the mere fact that so many Trump supporters faced consequences for Jan. 6 has already been a deterrence to others. When Trump demanded protests outside his Manhattan criminal trial last year, few heeded the call, and several prominent right-wingers warned against participating in a mass demonstration.
Another obstacle to a second Jan. 6 riot is that Congress made changes to the Electoral Count Act, the law governing the presidential election certification process. It would take more lawmakers to initiate a formal challenge, and the procedures for states submitting their slates of electors have been tightened up to prevent rogue Republicans from smuggling fake electors into the Capitol.
But as Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said after Congress passed the reform, “it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem” — namely, that the Electoral College remains an intermediary between the popular vote and the election outcome, necessitating a bureaucratic scheme for transmitting electoral votes to Washington.
“There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief,” Raskin said in December 2022.
Another problem is that the reforms Congress passed didn’t create national standards for state voting procedures, said Dan Weiner, director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“You had mail ballots counted on a rolling basis in one state, so that they could get results on election night, and mail ballots that couldn’t be counted until the last poll closed in another state, which meant that you had states where it took days to count the ballots, and that that bred all sorts of conspiracy theories,” Weiner told HuffPost.
The electoral counting reforms will make it harder to try to pull a Jan. 6, Weiner said, but it’s still a threat. After all, it’s not like Trump’s co-conspirators were espousing accepted legal theories about the Electoral Count Act in the first place.
The new law, Weiner said, has “taken away some of the legal cover that bad actors might have tried to claim, but you’re just not out of the woods, and there’s always going to be some vulnerability.”
Regardless, Trump will have less power to affect the process for the simple reason that he’s not currently president. After he lost in 2020, he and his underlings tried to bully state legislatures into falsifying results, and he tried to use lackeys in the Justice Department to announce bogus fraud findings. He won’t have any official power to do such things this time around.
Still, Trump could appeal to his elected allies in Congress and in the states to contest the election results on his behalf, and also look to the conservative majority he helped appoint to the Supreme Court to intervene if he loses to Vice President Kamala Harris. It would ultimately be some version of a scheme his allies tried before: create enough chaos and uncertainty to deny his opponent 270 electoral votes and send the matter to the House of Representatives.
Speaking at the Democratic convention on Monday, Biden criticized Trump for declining to commit to accepting the election results, warning that the country isn’t out of the woods yet.
“This will be the first presidential election since January 6th. On that day, we almost lost everything about who we are as a country. And that threat — this is not hyperbole — that threat is still very much alive,” he said. “The vote each of us casts this year will determine whether democracy and freedom will prevail. It’s that simple.”