From the moment Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the surprise Democratic presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump began arguing that she was anointed through a “coup” rather than chosen by primary voters. After barely mentioning election integrity at the Republican convention in July, Trump is now casting the upcoming election as “rigged” against him and baselessly labeling any hurdle in his path as election interference.
“This was an overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow,” Trump said at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Saturday, referring to Harris replacing Biden on the ticket. He later added: “They deposed a president. It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”
Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in this year’s election are reminiscent of the tactics he used in the 2020 campaign and indicate how he could again seek to delegitimize the results if he loses, setting the stage for another combustible fight over the presidency, election and national security experts said….
Now Trump has refused to say that he will accept the outcome of the election if he loses.
“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Trump said in a May interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
The overarching message, often pushed by Trump himself, is that the race has entered a make-or-break stage in which a shadowy Democratic apparatus is poised to steal Republican votes. While doing this, Trump has tried to deflect attacks that he is a threat to democracy by insisting that he’s the true protector of it, recently saying he “took a bullet for democracy” and that Democrats “are the real THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”
Through this year’s presidential campaign, Trump has portrayed himself as a victim of a Democratic power grab. He blamed his dozens of criminal charges on the Biden administration, accusing his original opponent of weaponizing the judicial system as a form of election interference.