When Donald Trump tells 150 million followers that Vice President Kamala Harris is lying about her crowd size, the mainstream media and the State Department should pay close attention. Trump isn’t just licking his wounded ego, he’s test marketing “Stop the Steal” redux.
Trump began spreading false claims about the November 2020 election in April 2020, months before the first vote was cast. Less than a year later, his false claims crescendoed in a violent attack at the U.S. Capitol, costing five people their lives, causing $3 billion in damages, and wounding American democracy.
January 6, 2021 — the first and only such attack in U.S. history — was based entirely on Trump’s persistent lies that the Biden campaign engaged in voter fraud and election interference, even as Trump himself committed the crimes he projected. As he begins to chant the same fact-free mantra against Harris in 2024, Act Two has begun, only the names have been changed.
Fake Trump cries about fake Harris supporters
Last week, after Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz landed at a Detroit aircraft hangar, they were greeted by thousands of supporters as they stepped off Air Force Two. In response to photos of the crowd, Trump claimed on his vanity social media platform that Harris was using Artificial Intelligence to generate fake pictures of fake crowds:
“(Harris is) a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the “crowd” looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake “crowds” at her speeches.
This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING — And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!”
Trump is not only gaslighting his supporters over Harris’ crowd size, he’s building the narrative that the only way Harris will defeat him — as Biden defeated him in 2020 — is if she cheats.
More than mere gaslighting, this narrative will provide the crucial permission structure for MAGA to engage in political violence if and when Trump loses again.
A sickening sense of déjà vu
Trump’s legal team argues that, even though his 2020 election challenges were defeated in over 60 separate courts of law, Trump’s lies about a stolen election were political speech protected by the First Amendment.
Although the First Amendment gives broad protection to political speech, and a Trump-packed Supreme Court gave some credence to his outrageous Presidential immunity claims, the First Amendment has never protected fraud: “(T)he prevention and punishment of fraud has never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem” and “(F)raudulent representations through speech for personal gain” are “not protected by the First Amendment.”)
This November, Trump will fraudulently claim he won in states he lost, invent problems with voting equipment, and challenge results in Democrat-run cities. It’s déjà vu all over again.
Only this time, Trump isn’t just lying to cling to power after 81 million voters rejected him. This time he’s lying to stay out of prison.
Republicans want Trump to knock it off
Trump is clearly alarmed over Harris’ crowd size, and members of the Republican party would like him to stop talking about it. Rejecting that advice, during his fact-free news conference at Mar-a-Lago, he claimed he draws the “biggest crowds” in politics, and that he attracted a bigger crowd to the ellipse on January 6, 2021, than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. attracted to the Lincoln Memorial for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.
Setting aside the chutzpah of comparing MLK’s legendary civil rights speech to his own attempt to overthrow an election, Trump’s obsession with crowd size is a Rorschach test revealing how he sees the role of the U.S. presidency: superficial, a tool of manipulation, a continuation of his reality-TV fame.
John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona, recently wrote an opinion column urging Republicans to reject Trump’s continuing lies about the election and to elect Harris, to give the Republican Party a chance to heal and reset. Giles reflected that the state of Arizona had, “faced the brunt of misinformation, election denialism and an erosion of trust in our justice system,” from Trump’s repeated false attempts to disrupt the U.S. electoral process.
If MAGA believes Harris’ crowds are fake, they will believe the results are stolen
There’s a method to Trump’s madness, and there’s madness with his methods, made plain with Jan. 6 hindsight.
Trump, with the help of Fox News and similar propaganda outlets, was able to convince enough followers that the 2020 election was stolen that they breached the capital looking to hang the Vice President. Because the personal stakes for Trump are much, much higher this year, the risks to the Capitol Police, the District of Columbia, security agencies and the American public in general are also higher.
There’s a reason Trump keeps talking about pardoning violent Jan. 6 protesters; it’s the same reason he opened his 2024 inaugural rally performing with the Jan. 6 Choir. He’s trying to repackage and market his election crimes as laudatory acts of patriotism, in hopes his zealots will re-enlist despite hundreds of criminal convictions that followed Jan. 6.
Trump knows that if MAGA believes Harris-Walz crowds are “fake,” they will believe Trump’s 2024 loss is also fake. It’s important for national security experts to know that a cornered, frightened, and criminally convicted rat will stop at nothing to save itself.
Election deniers now control local elections in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. More than 70 election officials around the country have already announced they will not certify the results if Harris wins.
The State Department, Justice Department, National Guard, State Police, and Capitol Police had best gear up, and get prepared for anything.
Sabrina Haake is a federal trial lawyer, specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the Substack newsletter The Haake Take.
