The threat to elections heats up

Over the past few days, President Trump has returned to one of his central animating issues: purported threats to the security of American elections. He has repeatedly claimed that elections at the local, state and federal level are suspect, exclusively reserving those accusations for elections in which his allies have lost and reserving nearly all of his energy for elections that he himself didn’t win.

The most obvious example is the 2020 presidential race. Trump lost that contest, unquestionably. We know this in part because the results were unambiguous and relatively quick to be finalized. But we know it primarily because Donald Trump and everyone into his outer orbit spent an enormous amount of money and time and energy trying to prove that he didn’t lose, without success. There were movies about how the election was stolen, and there were books and there were conferences and there were probably more social media posts than exist atoms in the Washington Monument, but at no point did anything emerge that suggested that even questions about the election were legitimate, much less anything showing that the election wasn’t.

Yet Trump has recently returned to this idea that he was the true victor in the 2020 election, even as he’s outlining steps that would make future elections — including those in 2026 and 2028 — less free and less open.