Trump prepares Action Plan in case of election defeat

Through public remarks, Truth Social screeds and more than 100 preemptive lawsuits, Donald Trump is assembling a detailed catalog of excuses for rejecting the results of the 2024 election — if he loses, News.Az reports citing Gazeta.Ru .

Why it matters: The Trump-aligned efforts to overturn the 2020 election — both overtly and covertly, peacefully then violently — shocked the American public. No one should be surprised this time around.

Listen to Trump: The former president, who risks jail time and more criminal trials if he loses, has expanded his range of baseless attacks on U.S. voting procedures in recent weeks and months.

Overseas voting: Trump falsely claimed Monday that Democrats are exploiting an overseas ballot program for expats and military members in order to circumvent "any citizenship check or verification of identity."
Early voting: At a rally in Pennsylvania last week, Trump denounced what he called the "stupid" concept of voting 45 days before the election — floating conspiracy theories about his loss in the crucial swing state four years ago.

Mail-in voting: Trump has long despised mail-in ballots. He's recently attacked the U.S. Postal Service as incompetent and untrustworthy — even as the GOP has pushed its voters to embrace the practice.

Zoom in: The millions of undocumented migrants who have crossed into the U.S. during the Biden administration are a top campaign issue. They're also being used to fuel new voter fraud conspiracy theories.

Earlier this month, Trump demanded that House Republicans use the threat of a government shutdown to pass a measure requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

That effort failed, but it gave Trump and Republicans a new excuse to claim election fraud — even though it's already illegal and exceedingly rare for non-citizens to vote in U.S. elections.

Between the lines: Even without evidence of voting irregularities, Trump is preparing to deploy broader rhetorical arguments for why the election was fundamentally unfair.

The former president has accused Democrats of "cheating" by swapping out President Biden for Vice President Kamala Harris in June, and engaging in "lawfare" through criminal prosecution.

"If there was no cheating — if God came down from on high and said 'I'm going to be your vote tabulator for this election,' I would leave this podium right now," Trump said Sunday at a rally in Pennsylvania.

"We have to have a landslide because they cheat so damn much."

The big picture: Since 2020, the Republican Party apparatus has been reorganized — from the top down — to give credence to Trump's false claims that election fraud is a scourge on American politics.

Trump's campaign and the Republican National Committee say they've built a network of about 175,000 volunteer poll watchers and poll workers, part of a relentless focus on "election integrity."

In Georgia, a hard-right election board has passed new rules that Democrats fear could be used to undermine confidence in the results if Trump loses the critical battleground state.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) drew outrage last week by pledging to certify the 2024 election and "follow the Constitution" only if it's a "free, fair and safe election."

News.Az