Vice President Kamala Harris’ appearance with former Representative Liz Cheney at Ripon College was focused heavily on the threat former President Donald Trump poses to democracy, one of the Republicans’ biggest weaknesses in the 2024 presidential election.
But even if the Democrats’ presidential campaign had focused on something else entirely, Trump would have inserted it into the news cycle himself.
Just hours earlier, on the other side of Lake Michigan, Trump reprised his favourite lie about the 2020 election being stolen, essentially performing the political equivalent of Harris advertising how many undocumented immigrants had crossed the US-Mexico border since January 2021.
“We did great in 2016 and a lot of people don’t know that we did much better in 2020. We won. We won. We did win. It was a rigged election,” Trump told the crowd at Saginaw State University. “That is why I am doing it again. If I thought I lost I would not be doing this again.”
Trump’s inability to accept his defeat, the binds it has placed on fellow Republicans and most crucially, the federal indictments it led to, have combined to create a world where Harris hardly needs to mention one of her opponents’ biggest weaknesses on paid media, allowing her campaign to focus on limiting Trump’s edge on issues important to voters like immigration and the economy.
Polls show Harris with a small and stable lead over Trump in the popular vote, with all seven major swing states, including Wisconsin and Michigan, up for grabs between the two candidates with less than 40 days before election day. Every time Trump denies the results of the election, he reminds voters of one of his least popular positions. Two-thirds of Americans believe Biden legitimately won the election, according to a YouGov/Economist poll released this week.
“Trump refused to accept the will of the people and the results of an election that was free and fair,” Harris said on stage with Cheney, who famously broke with Trump over the insurrection and then helped lead the congressional investigation of his actions. “He sent an armed mob to the Capitol where they assaulted law enforcement officers. He threatened the life of his own vice president.”
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance ― a more disciplined politician than Trump ― desperately sought to change the subject on Wednesday, revealing Trump’s campaign likely agrees with Republican operatives who have privately begged for the former president to drop his discussion of a stolen election.
“The media is obsessed with talking about the election of four years ago,” Vance said at a campaign event in Michigan, ignoring his running mate’s obsession with the topic. “I’m focused on the election of 33 days from now because I want to throw Kamala Harris out of office.”
“We did great in 2016 and a lot of people don't know that we did much better in 2020. We won. We won. We did win. It was a rigged election.”
- Donald Trump
Strangely, it was Vance who started the return of election denial to the news cycle. During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Vance refused to say whether Trump lost the 2020 election when directly asked by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential candidate. The answer overshadowed what had been a strong debate performance from Vance, a candidate who entered the contest with weak favourability numbers.
Then, in a court filing unsealed on Wednesday, Special Counsel Jack Smith revealed new details about Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss, including that Trump allegedly said “so what” when White House staff told him his vice president had fled a violent mob on Capitol Hill. (Trump would likely be on trial for those efforts, had the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court not issued a ruling protecting him and delaying the trial.)
During her rally with Harris, Cheney invoked these new revelations from Smith, to boos from the crowd, including shouts of “traitor!” from one man. “Donald Trump did not want to stop the violent attacks on the capitol,” she said, noting the information in Smith’s court filing came from Trump’s “closest aides.”
With election denial a dominant topic of the news cycle, Democrats ― who have generally used the “democracy in danger” frame less since Harris took over for President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket ― are able to focus their advertising on other topics.
Right now, between the Harris campaign and Future Forward ― their allied super PAC ― Democrats appear to be running just one television ad focused on the idea Trump is a threat to democracy, one focused on Vance’s comments on Tuesday night, while running multiple ads on topics like health care, battling inflation, Trump’s family separation on the border, and Harris’ own commitment to border security.
In the ad library of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Harris’ campaign is running thousands of different ads, often just slightly different from one another. Only 34 of those ads mention democracy, and they are all versions of the same video.
“To me, Kamala Harris is the one who’s shown she cares about law, about democracy, about the whole of America,” a young woman says in the ad. “I think it’s just too risky to put democracy in the hands of someone who has shown they have no problem undermining it if it’s to their benefit.”
But even before Vance’s comments or Smith’s legal filing, Trump had already brought up the stolen election repeatedly in the past week ― he brings up 2020, unprompted, pretty much every time he speaks in public, though he doesn’t always explicitly say it was “rigged.”
“It was a terrible thing that happened last time. If that didn’t happen we’d have a much different country today,” Trump said in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, describing changes to voting procedures precipitated by the pandemic and then insinuating something worse.
“They did a lot of bad things,” Trump said. “But I think that people are watching this time, we have lots of lawyers watching, and we’re doing it early rather than late.”
At another rally in Waunakee that day, Trump seemed to acknowledge having lost by a “sliver” in 2020, but then called it a “disgrace” and said, “They’re not going to be able to do that a second time.” (At last month’s debate, Trump said he was being “sarcastic” when asked about a previous instance when he seemed to acknowledge losing in 2020.)
On Sunday, Trump complained that he was going to build another 200 miles of wall along the southern US border, but a “very disruptive election” spoiled his plans.
“A horrible thing happened. Horrible, horrible, including in this state,” Trump said in Erie, Pennsylvania. “We won it in 2016, easily, and then in this state a bad thing happened.”
The day before, at an event in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, Trump blamed a “rigged election” for the unfinished wall. “And when they took over because of a rigged election, when they took over, they didn’t want anything to do with putting those panels up,” Trump said, referring to construction materials.
And as the special counsel builds his case outlining Trump’s various alleged criminal efforts to undo the last presidential election, including by directing a mob of his supporters to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump has continuously sought to whitewash his actions that day.
On Wednesday, he claimed on Truth Social that “major revelations” from transcripts obtained by Representative Barry Loudermilk (Republican, Georgia), of military officials describing preparations ahead of the Capitol riot, showed that “the Deep State chose to DISREGARD my direct authorisation of at least 10,000 National Guard Troops to ensure that Washington, DC, was safe and secure on January 6th.”
In fact, the transcripts do not validate Trump’s claim to have ordered 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the city.
Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump, told Defence Department investigators in 2021 that Trump said something to the effect of, “just make sure it’s safe,” but didn’t specifically order military leaders to deploy the National Guard. “There was no discussion of 10,000 troops,” Milley said, according to the recently released transcript.
The special counsel’s court filing this week described Trump spending the day in a White House dining room, “reviewing Twitter on his phone” with Fox News carrying live coverage of the riot on a nearby TV. He sent tweets attacking Pence for not blocking the certification of the election, further enraging the crowd, and when an aide told him Pence had been evacuated, Trump’s response was, according to the filing, “So what?”
Michael Fanone, a former DC police officer who was brutally beaten by the mob that day as he defended the west front of the Capitol, has become a spokesman for a liberal group called Courage for America that has been demanding lawmakers certify the 2024 election without any January 6-style shenanigans. He said Trump is an unrepentant insurrectionist who would do it all again.
“He didn’t do a goddamn thing for f**king 3 1/2 hours while myself and my colleagues were f**king fighting for their lives on west front of the Capitol,” Fanone told HuffPost. “He didn’t do a goddamn thing. He looked at f**king Twitter and watched f**king Fox News.”