Finally, the Idiocy Of Trump’s Mail-In Voting Paranoia Revealed. Too Bad MAGAts Won’t Read This

It is, of course, true that voter fraud happens. It is also true that gang violence happens. It is not true, though, that voter fraud happens rampantly, affecting the results of elections, any more than it is true that gang violence poses a dire and immediate threat to most Americans. The analogy I like to use is car theft. Trump is pointing to a few stolen cars and alleging that there is necessarily a national ring of car thieves which is stealing hundreds of thousands of vehicles and putting the entire idea of private car ownership at risk.

Or, really, he and McEnany are pointing to the existence of crowbars as an argument in support of the idea that this national ring of car thieves exists. McEnany’s claims about fraud in Nevada derive entirely from her assertions that sending ballots to voters will facilitate fraud, not that fraud actually happens. Last week, we made a quiz aimed at helping the president’s team to differentiate between actual voter fraud and fraud-like things that they’re blowing out of proportion. It seems she has not yet taken it.

Trump “believes that voter fraud is real, in line with what we see all across the country, particularly with mail-in ballots which are prone to fraud,” McEnany said. If he actually believes this — a question in its own right — he’s foolish to do so. We don’t see wide-scale fraud all over the country, any more than we see wide-scale auto theft all over the country. Mail-in ballots are more prone to fraud than in-person voting (the focus of Trump’s hand-wringing in Pennsylvania in 2016), but in the same sense that people who leave their jewelry on nightstands are more prone to having it stolen than those who put it in their sock drawer: Neither happens very often.

The bottom line is that Trump wants to have an out on November 3 and he doesn’t care how big a lie he needs to tell in order to not look bad. He is constitutionally incapable of admitting failure, so he needs to cobble together a conspiracy theory about voter fraud. And his enablers, McEnany and who knows who else in the GOP will support him in this. It is simply easier for Trump — and them — to attack our institutions than it is to deal with defeat. I never thought I would see an iteration of the Republican party so lacking in character as the one that we deal with today.

This is not democracy. This is not America. This is Trumpism, aided and abetted by a corrupt GOP. Trump is only worried about saving face. We need to be worried about saving America’s ass.