Donald Trump and the billionaires around him are preparing, again, to steal the presidential election. The US political media, meanwhile, are approaching it with the same “nothing to see here” confidence they took to their fumbled reporting of Trump’s last attempted coup.
The result is a “sane-washing” of Donald Trump’s coup-planning; planning that is happening right in front of us. Discredit the vote in advance, claim victory early, disrupt the count to block the Electoral College (particularly in close swing states), lean into the power of right-wing media and public disorder, and exploit enough of the constitutional vagaries to have Trump declared elected.
Even the release over the weekend of 1,889 pages of heavily redacted evidence related to the ongoing criminal prosecution of Trump for illegally seeking to overturn the 2020 election didn’t shake up traditional media’s reluctance to see what’s right in front of them. Donald Trump is doing it again — this time with the active backing of the billionaire class, led by Elon Musk.
Step one in the would-be autocrat’s playbook for overturning an election? Undermine its legitimacy. Just look at how Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith described Trump’s actions in this month’s criminal indictment:
Although his multiple conspiracies begin after election day in 2020, the defendant laid the groundwork for his crimes well before then … In the months leading up to the election, he refused to say whether he would accept the election results, [and] insisted he could lose the election only because of fraud.
A serious news outlet would use this warning to point at the current Trump campaign with a big red arrow that reads: “We are here.”
Discredit in advance
Last time around, Politico, the Washington press corp’s in-house journal, poked at the Republican nominee’s then-odd claims to ask: “What if Trump won’t accept 2020 defeat?” But it then disregarded its question with a head-shakingly sage “the scenarios all seem far-fetched”.
It was only in the dying days of that year’s campaign that Barton Gellman in The Atlantic took a serious look and discovered that “Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states”.
Then once the voting was done, Fox News swung into gear to promote the stolen election narrative.
This time around, according to Trump and his surrogates, it’s illegal migrants who are fraudulently tilting the vote to Democrats. As he said in last month’s presidential debate: “Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.”
It’s a modern twist on the right’s Great Replacement Theory: that elites (with all the antisemitic freight that word carries in right-wing conspiracies) are seeking to replace “real” Americans with non-European migrants.
It’s an echo of Trump’s attempt to exploit the spike of mail-in ballots in 2020, according to Smith’s indictment, when he claimed these largely Democrat-leaning votes were inherently fraudulent and that only votes counted on voting day were valid. This plan, however, was partly spiked by Fox News’ surprise call of Arizona for Biden on election night, leading to the Trump campaign’s post-election pivot to the more bizarre voting machines conspiracy.
The fraud narrative
Illegal migrants have also become a talking point across right-wing media. Here’s Virginia’s Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin on Fox News over the weekend on “the most important topic” of stopping non-citizens from voting. Or the Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton earlier this month earnestly explaining the need to verify the citizenship of 500,000 voters.
The conspiracy is being promoted across social media by trolls and bots from hostile states, particularly Russia, and is on high rotation on Elon Musk’s algorithmically boosted personal feed on X/Twitter. On Monday he tweeted: “If given another four years, the Dem machine will legalize so many illegals that there will be no swing states.” Or Sunday: “Michigan has more registered voters than eligible citizens!?”
The right is also reaching into its basket of delegitimisation tactics: claiming Kamala Harris is just not up to the job, is a diversity hire, is a pretender who deposed Biden. There’s the blinkered focus on “right-aligned narrative polling”, which, as Democrat Simon Rosenberg has been saying since 2022, only exists “to move the polling averages to the right”. And then there’s Trump’s perpetual “look at my crowds” attempts to claim a popular mandate (which is why Democrat jokes about his smaller and boring rallies have a serious meaning.)
For all their self-professed hard-boiled scepticism, the American political press corp (Australia’s, too) is a sucker for the “just asking questions” political stunt, a poll, or a colourful rhetorical flourish.
They struggle to hear when the right speaks out of both sides of its mouth — one side dog-whistling to the base, and the other to traditional media, dismissing the Republican nominee’s anti-democratic claims as just ”Trump being Trump”. But as leading economics blogger Brad DeLong wrote in his Substack newsletter Grasping Reality this week: “You have to recognize that the players of these games [do] not intend any single one of these meanings. They intend them all.”
Instead, political media (yes, here in Australia, too) only hears what it wants to hear, relying on the comfort of the belief that the insider winking is just politics, comforted by a “too far-fetched to be true” mantra.
Will it work? Who knows. But a news media that has already lived through one test-run should be more aware of the signs of a repeat.
