Kari Lake at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on March 3, 2023 (Consolidated News Photos/Shutterstock.com)
President Donald Trump continues falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him — and voters in a key swing state are fed up with it.
“It's bull,” an Arizona woman told MS NOW correspondent Jillian Frankel in an interview that aired on Tuesday. “I think, I mean, we can count the vote, and we should allow everybody to vote and make sure everything is counted, honestly. And I don't believe in rigged [elections], but there's always corruption, right? And that's gonna be high.”
An Arizona man told Frankel that Trump’s election denier rhetoric “plays negatively with me, because it's like, come on, that's foolishness. And no, that's just a waste of time, and I don't like that.”
Another Arizona man told Frankel that “I've heard that ever since the 2020 election, and it's bogus. And it's sad that someone who doesn't win just claims that it was all a sham. But if he would have won, would he have also claimed it was a sham? Probably not.”
MS NOW anchor Katy Tur cut away from the interviews to observe that “Donald Trump did try to claim the 2016 election was a sham until he started winning, and then he stopped. So there's evidence for that.” She then asked MS NOW political reporter Shawna Thomas for her views on the subject.
“I think it's actually, in some ways, telling, because the president spoke out about the elections and what happened in 2020 last week and gave that big speech,” Thomas opined, referring to Trump’s Thursday speech repeating his debunked claims about the 2020 election. “In some ways, that's part of why we are grouping these three candidates together, and we are talking about this and then putting that question to the voters. Jillian Frankel, our reporter who's out in Arizona, she talked to voters about many things. She asked that question, one, because we were curious what they would say in Arizona. But when she just asked them the open-ended sort of ‘why are you voting, what do you care about,’ they came back to the economy, policies, the things your guest in New York was talking about — gas prices. So I think in some ways he put another focus on election denialism that maybe voters wouldn't have even been thinking about as much, at least today, on Arizona primary day, if he hadn't done that.”
Trump’s obsession with the 2020 election speaks to what some experts believe is a deeper pathology in his overall outlook. Mother Jones' national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman spoke to Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman about that exact subject in an interview last week.
“The disturbing thing here is that Georgia is just a microcosm of what they’re planning to do to interfere in the midterms,” Berman told Goodman. “The raid on Fulton County, Georgia, the taking of 700 boxes of ballots, that is a preview of the type of suppression and intimidation the Trump administration wants to do everywhere in 2026. And we’re seeing this with the primetime address the president is planning to give.”
He added, “He’s going to lie and say there was rampant fraud and foreign interference in the 2020 election, so that he can then say we have to seize voting machines, we have to stop mail voting, we have to do all the things that he tried to do in 2020 but was unsuccessful.”
Berman concluded, “And the bottom line here is they keep lying about the 2020 election so that they can justify massive interference in the 2026 election. It really is that simple. You put all the different moves of the administration together, that is the underlying goal, to build a narrative that will justify some kind of unprecedented intervention in the midterms to challenge how people vote, how votes are counted and how elections are certified.”
Speaking with this journalist for Salon days before the 2020 election, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist formerly from Yale University, predicted that the president’s displayed psychological tendencies would make it impossible for him to admit defeat.
“Just as one once settled for adulation in lieu of love, one may settle for fear when adulation no longer seems attainable,” Dr. Lee told this journalist at the time. “Rage attacks are common, for people are bound to fall short of expectation for such a needy personality—and eventually everyone falls into this category. But when there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him.”
She continued, “It is far easier for the pathological narcissist to consider destroying oneself and the world, especially its ‘laughing eyes,’ than to retreat into becoming a ‘loser’ and a ‘sucker’ — which to someone suffering from this condition will feel like psychic death.”
As conservative columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post in February, Trump repeatedly failed to prove any fraud when given a chance to do so in court.
“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”
Will concluded, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.”