That time Trump admitted he’s been lying

Editor's Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Donald Trump misspelled Sen. Lindsey Graham's name. It has since been updated.

We have grown so accustomed to hearing Donald Trump accuse Joe Biden and the Democrats of rigging or stealing elections we might not notice when he admits he’s been lying the whole time. But that’s what happened April 8.

Make no mistake. He didn’t mean to. It was an accident. He was intending to get US Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, to stop going on and on andon about the desire for a national abortion ban among a majority of Republican voters. Graham himself has nothing to fear. Trump does. He’s principally responsible for the collapse of abortion rights. Meanwhile, Republican candidates have been losing winnable elections since 2022.

Trump would prefer to pretend that the abortion question is settled. He’d prefer to fault Biden and the Democrats for making a fuss, as if abortion were just a way for them to win elections rather than a serious policy disagreement. That’s why he announced two weeks ago that abortion is a state’s rights thing. Nothing to do with him, it’s about the states – end of debate. The debate is hardly ended. Neither are the Democrats at fault.

On the one hand are GOP-controlled states like Arizona and Alabama taking antiabortion politics to its logical conclusion. (Alabama’s Supreme Court outlawed, in effect, in vitro fertilization. Arizona’s Supreme Court said an abortion ban from 1864 was still valid.) On the other hand are people like Graham going on and on andon. It would be easier if Trump’s own side would just shut up already. But it won’t. It can’t. Rightwing politics is never satisfied.

All by itself, this would be enough for any normal presidential candidate to worry about the normal democratic consequences of unforced errors. If Trump and the Republicans don’t stop reminding everyone that they have taken the very wrong and very unpopular side of a serious policy disagreement, they run the risk of doing the Democrats’ work for them.

And this is pretty much what Donald Trump said on his social media site in an April 8 post. “Many Good Republicans lost Elections because of this issue, and people like Lindsey Graham, that are unrelenting, are handing Democrats their dream of the House, Senate and perhaps the Presidency.”

That’s a confession, though obviously unintended. If Trump really believed that Joe Biden and the Democrats rigged the last election, and are rigging the current election, there would be no reason to worry about the normal democratic consequences of unforced errors, because the rules of normal democratic politics don’t apply when an election isn’t free and fair.

Between Trump and a jail cell

Honesty, I’m not paying that much attention to Donald Trump’s trial. I know, I know. I probably should. After all, it’s the first time in our history that a former president is facing criminal accountability, in this case for using his business, in 2016, to cover up payments to Stormy Daniels for her silence about their sexual relationship, in effect defrauding the American people.

The main event isn’t as interesting to me as the smaller moments around it, like this: Donald Trump has been trying to get more people to show up at his trial. I don’t mean family members. (They seem to have given up on him.) I mean the people he truly desires. (He seems to believe they love him.) But his crowds of “protesters” are shrinking in size as rapidly as the audiences at his campaign rallies. It’s a visible sign of dwindling public support. For a showman and con artist like him, that’s unthinkable. So, naturally, he lies.

No one is stopping anyone from “protesting,” but that’s not my point. My point is to suggest a connection between Trump’s public support and the people who are bringing charges against him. I think it’s a proportional relationship. The more prosecutors try holding him accountable for his crimes, the more Trump’s supporters find reasons to stay home. Inversely, the more they stay home, the more prosecutors hold him accountable.

This proportional relationship is true, because Trump believes it is. The lies are my evidence. The case against him is damning (as are the other three cases in Georgia, Florida and Washington, DC). He lies about supporters being “rudely and systematically shut down and ushered off” to bring out more supporters. And he lies, because he’s desperate. Turning this proportional relationship upside down is what’s standing between him and a jail cell.