graduate institute of international studies

President Donald Trump and his supporters keep insisting that Spencer Pratt, Trump’s fellow ex-reality TV star, was robbed in the Los Angeles mayoral race. Yet according to Nick Catoggio from the center-right publication The Dispatch, Trump and his backers are really upset about something else — the fact that the election results reveal their increasing irrelevance.

“It makes sense that a party of postliberals, paranoiacs, and grifters would believe that any election it loses has been rigged against it,” Catoggio wrote. “But Trump-era Republicans don’t actually believe that. The mass psychosis that followed the 2020 presidential race remains the exception, not the rule.”

After ticking off races that Republicans did not contest, such as Democratic successes in the 2022 midterm elections and the 2025 gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, Catoggio argued that there is a different reason why “your favorite MAGA cultist’s social media account” keeps insisting Pratt won.

“Pratt running for mayor of Los Angeles was like Zohran Mamdani running for mayor of some struggling town in Wyoming,” Catoggio observed. “He might get further than most members of his party via populism, media savvy, and sheer charisma, but he won’t get far.”

He added, “In other words, Pratt’s initial second-place finish was a so-called ‘red mirage’ a la Pennsylvania in 2020. It’s been explained to right-wingers a thousand times that Donald Trump’s disappearing ‘lead’ in the state that year was an artifact of Republicans preferring to vote in-person and Democrats preferring to vote by mail. In-person votes were counted immediately, whereas mail ballots weren’t opened until Election Day, leading to a false impression on election night that Trump was ahead when in reality many of Biden’s votes simply hadn’t been tallied yet.”

He added, “It isn’t complicated. The fact that many on the right persist in explaining ‘red mirages’ with conspiracies suggests a defect in intellect or integrity, between which I leave you to decide for yourself.”

From there he argued that “if Democrats have the numbers to squash Pratt in L.A., Americans may reason, they might have the numbers to squash Republicans across the map. If his defeat is plausible and legitimate, potentially all GOP defeats in November are.” After all, Pratt’s campaign was run along the same lines as Trump’s presidential bids.

“It’s not a coincidence that some of the elements of Prattmania resemble elements of Trumpmania circa 2016,” Catoggio said. “In both cases, a reality-television celebrity outsider whom no one regarded very highly took up working-class public-order grievances against an out-of-touch liberal establishment. And in both cases, that celebrity beat the expectations of the political smart set by connecting with the average Joe through smart uses of new and old media.”

He added, “Accepting the result and reckoning with what it says about their own popularity was one option for populists to cope with a traumatic reality. The other was pretending that Pratt didn’t lose, avoiding reality by denying that it happened and refusing to hear otherwise in the same way their hero did when he stormed out of an interview about an election he lost. Is it any surprise that they made the choice they did?”

Despite the lack of any evidence that the mayoral race was stolen, Trump supporters have fallen in line claiming that there was election theft.

"A 43,000-vote swing just handed Nithya Raman the edge over Spencer Pratt in LA,” an X user posted as Trump pushed election fraud narratives. “The exact size of the city's homeless population. Ballot harvesting from shelters, universal mail ballots, and late drops made it happen. Coincidence?"

Similarly House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju on Monday that “I'm not saying it's rigged. I'm saying it stinks to high heaven. And everybody knows that. Let's remove the appearance of impropriety. Let's have, what a concept, let's have votes on an election the day of the election. That's what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with this.”

When Raju asked Johnson if he had evidence the election was improper, the House Speaker admitted that “I don't — some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that it is impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here. And that's a concern. We need people to believe in the integrity of our election system.”

Fox News host Laura Ingraham is getting bummed with President Donald Trump’s mixed messaging and embarrassing fabrications, especially when they keep producing cringe moments in U.S. invasion of Iran, reports Mediaite.

Specifically, Ingraham was aggravated that Iranians were still able to strike U.S. targets when their military was allegedly destroyed, as Trump and his cohorts keep claiming.

Ingraham was speaking with former State Department official Nathan Sales about the U.S. strikes against Iran on Tuesday in retaliation for the downing of an Apache helicopter by an Iranian drone — after Trump vowed to respond to the Iranian attack earlier on Tuesday.

But the reason for the U.S. response was really the root of Ingraham’s ire.

“We keep hearing their military is destroyed,” Ingraham told Sales. “But if their military is destroyed, how are they continuing to hit us? I mean, an Apache helicopter costs about, what, about $46 million?”

Mediaite reports the attack on the helicopter came as a bit of a surprise to Fox because of Trump’s conflicting remarks and” the 38 times the president has claimed that the two sides were close to reaching a deal.”

Also surprised, apparently, was Ingraham.

“One thing that a lot of Americans can’t really wrap their heads about here is we keep hearing that they’ve been destroyed, decimated. The word is often used ungrammatically, but nevertheless … we hear that, and we know there’s extensive damage. Yet these drones are lethal, and they’re easy to make. They’re fairly cheap, and obviously did some damage to us last night over Oman. How can we guard against that? How can we protect against that, given the stakes here, again back home, and over there?”

Sales insisted “the Iranian military threat has been substantially degraded,” but “it hasn’t gone down to zero.”

For Ingraham, that wasn’t good enough.

“Why have we left any military structure there? … [W]e seem to have hit a number of base points tonight and are still, perhaps. We knew where those were. Why did we leave any of them standing? If we wanted to just really get this done, why are they still standing at all?” Ingraham demanded.

The explosion came a handful of weeks after musician Kid Rock scored a ride at Fort Belvoir in the same kind of Apache Helicopters when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave him a trip. Kid Rock’s trip came after an earlier controversial flyover at the artist’s Nashville home prompted the Army to suspend the aircrew involved in the stunt. Hegseth swiftly reversed the suspensions.

Overcoming a series of scandals that experts feared would sink his campaign, former oysterman Graham Platner defeated Gov. Janet Mills in the Maine Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday.

Platner entered the election with high hopes, as supporters embraced his economic populist message. Yet despite receiving high profile endorsements, including from the democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Platner’s campaign was bogged down by a series of scandals. First it came out that he had a Nazi tattoo on his chest, which he claims he chose without realizing its fascist origins. Then it was revealed that he had made racist, homophobic and sexist comments on Reddit boards, including claiming Black people are bad tippers and that victims of sexual violence needed to take accountability. Next it was revealed that he had shared intimate tests with multiple women while married, with a former campaign adviser accusing him of misleading people about this and other aspects of his past.

Despite these potential political liabilities, Platner convinced enough Democratic primary voters that he could defeat the incumbent Republican to prevail in the primary. He will now face off in the general election against Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) — with one caveat. If more scandals come out against Platner, Democrats can try to convince him to withdraw and pick a replacement candidate at a convention in July.

An ex-prosecutor said that President Donald Trump’s lingering obsession with claiming elections were stolen reflects “ferrets” in his head having their way with him.

“It is currently affecting what he does and government policy,” former deputy assistant attorney general Harry Litman told conservative commentator Charlie Sykes on Tuesday. “It's not just a stray fit of temper.”

Worse, prior to Sykes playing a clip of Trump storming out of his interview with NBC News reporter Kristen Welker, he commented that “the ferrets are getting more rabid.”

"He really looked to me like [he was] on the edge of a stroke,” Litman said.

Litman explained that “when he's challenged, [Trump] literally takes his ball and goes home. He's such an eight-year-old spoiled boy."

"By now you would think he would have the wherewithal — and what he does is try to interrupt, interrupt — but at that point, when you're in that interview and you storm out and you are the president of the United States, it's clear you're the one who looks weak, the thing that he tries always to avoid. So, for all those reasons, I thought it was a very telling exchange, even better sort of, you know, in the flesh, as it were," Litman added.

Sykes added that Trump became angry at Welker because she dare to ask him for evidence to his claim that the California elections are being stolen. Instead of providing evidence, Trump attacked Welker as corrupt and stupid.

“What a flaming jerk is the president of the United States,” Litman observed. “You know, stunning, really.”

Similar to Sykes and Litman, MS NOW commentator Matthew Bartlett claimed that Trump’s decision to walk out of the Welker interview reveals that he is in decline — specifically, political decline.

“On Sunday, President Trump quit an interview with Kristen Welker of ‘Meet the Press’ after becoming frustrated as he faced challenging questions,” MS NOW’s Matthew Bartlett wrote on Monday. “Fighting with the media is nothing new for the president, but the notion of giving up midway through when things get tough may be more indicative of Trump’s current mindset and emblematic of his second presidency.”

After describing how Trump has neglected to focus on the affordability issues that are top of mind for most Americans, and instead pursued a far right agenda of mass deportations, gutting government and multiple wars, Bartlett argued that Trump may be costing his party the midterm elections.

Bartlett continued, “In a matter of months, attention will soon move from the White House to the campaign trail, and even successful presidents struggle to keep the spotlight off their potential successors. Candidates from both parties will have a chance to define themselves and offer their ideas on everything from artificial intelligence to taxes to war and peace. America’s next act will be written not in the Oval Office or the halls of Congress, but in the town halls and events across America.”

Billionaire Tom Steyer is officially out of the 2026 California gubernatorial race.

Steyer lost to both fellow Democrat and former United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra and a Republican, former Fox News host Steve Hilton. While Becerra was able to advance to the runoff relatively quickly after Election Night, Steyer and Hilton continued to face off against each other until Tuesday night.

Working against Steyer was the fact that he would have needed roughly one-third of the remaining roughly 1.3 million votes, including from populous counties like Fresno and Riverside that are not home to large numbers of the high-income progressives who were more likely to back Steyer.

“Tom Steyer ran for governor of California as a climate crusader endorsed by Bernie Sanders’ political organization, Our Revolution,” wrote MS NOW’s Armand Manoukian on Thursday. “He also spent at least $216 million of his own money on the race — and in the end, that was the only thing voters seemed to remember. With nearly 58 percent of the vote counted, he is running third.”

“The timing is unkind to the ultrawealthy,” Manoukian added. “In a March YouGov survey, 77 percent of adults said the wealthy have too much political power, and 52 percent said the government should try to reduce the share of wealth held by billionaires. More than half of adults told a May Politico poll that cost of living is the ‘worst they can remember.’ Against that backdrop, self-funding candidates — once a recruiter’s dream — have become a harder sell.”

Speaking to this journalist for Salon in 2020, Steyer argued that his political philosophy is based on the idea of regulating the free market to protect the environment and workers’ rights.

“People always want to say ‘free market,’” Steyer told Salon at the time. “I mean, those were the words you used, ‘free market economic structures.’ There are no free markets! Every market has rules. And so do we need to change the rules in the market? Heck yes! The whole idea of a free market, like God came down and in the state of nature created a free market? There’s no such thing. And just think about the labor market: Once upon a time, I could have hired a 12-year-old kid for 25 cents a day and worked him for 14 hours a day. Can’t do it now.”

He added, “You know why? Because they changed the rules. Because all markets are driven by rules. I will say this: unchecked capitalism in this respect has failed and will fail. The way that we’re going has failed and will fail.”

President Donald Trump’s controversial America’s 250th anniversary includes a set of mobile museums carrying displays about the nation’s history and prominent figures. But one of the displays is angering the religious community because it falsely claims that Muhammad Ali disavowed Islam.

“It is a stunning slight to the man — a beloved global icon, ambassador of peace, athletic legend, and cultural titan — and to Islam, a faith under siege by the Trump administration and others and for which Ali was a powerful envoy to mainstream America,” said former MS NOW analyst and producer Jonathan Larsen, describing the Freedom 250 organization’s so-called “Freedom Trucks.”

“After converting to Islam, he changed his name to Muhammad Ali though he later disavowed the religion,” the Freedom 250 truck Muhammad Ali display claims. But Ali never disavowed, renounced, or converted from Islam, said Larsen. “He died a Muslim and reportedly had a Muslim funeral.

Regardless, six of Trump’s trucks are currently traveling the country as part of the 250th anniversary commemorations.

Larsen reports the nation’s leading Muslim advocacy organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), is horrified at the untruth, responded to the falsehood, saying, “We call on the Freedom 250 Mobile Museum to correct the record.”

The displays were produced with the help of two right-wing Christian organizations — Hillsdale College and the media company PragerU — so Larsen said it is no surprise the Freedom Truck exhibits “predictably skew toward Christianity, elevating its role and focusing more on Christian figures, some of them with little relevance to the arc of America’s story and obscure even to history buffs.”

But Ali is one of the most famous Muslims in the world, as well as possibly the most famous American Muslim in history, said Laesen.

“His conversion to Islam was a seminal moment of the 1960s, setting up the legal battle over his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War that robbed him of more than three years of boxing at his peak,” Larsen added. “A fearless advocate for racial equality and justice, Ali spent much of his life after leaving the ring as an ambassador for peace, especially in the Muslim world.

Prager U is known for hacking together inaccurate history videos that enrage historians. Despite its name, PragerU is not a university. It is a conservative nonprofit that produces short videos on historical, economic and climate topics. The organization is founded and run by conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager and funded by a number of like-minded philanthropists.

One of the videos in its history series, in which two modern-day animated kids travel back in time to talk to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, has come under some of the harshest criticism from historians and academics.

The video suggests that Douglass, a former slave, believed founders’ decision not to abolish slavery in the U.S. Constitution was worth it because it helped convince the Southern colonies to join the Union: “Our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it,” says cartoon Douglass.

President Donald Trump ally U.S. District Judge Ailleen Cannon dismissed the president's Mar-a-Lago classified documents prosecution in 2024, the criminal case involving Trump’s alleged stealing and misuse of classified state documents after his first term. Critics say Cannon unquestionably granted Trump a huge favor, siding with defense lawyers who said special counsel Jack Smith, who filed the charges, was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.

In May, she then blocked the release of the files Smith and his team created. Nonprofits have since appealed Cannon’s decision blocking of the files on free speech grounds and fighting government corruption, to prevent the judge from destroying Volume II of the investigation.

But there’s a complication in the Trump team’s attempt to bury Smith’s investigation. Carmen Mercedes Lineberger, 62, who formerly worked as a managing assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District, may have tried to mail the relevant documents of Trump’s damning investigation to her own email — and Trump’s politicized DOJ is still furious.

“The DOJ, which Donald Trump controls, has asked a judge who threw out the president's Mar-a-Lago classified documents prosecution to ‘consider further action’ after a former government lawyer was charged with stealing ex-special counsel Jack Smith's never publicly disclosed report on the probe,” Law and Crime reports.

The DOJ does not want the details of that case to appear in public, and they announced an indictment against Lineberger in May.

“The defendant concealed her actions by saving electronic copies of the government records in question under the misleading files names ‘chocolate cake recipe’ and ‘bundt cake recipe’ before electronically transmitting those records to her personal email accounts,” Trump DOJ alleged in May. “As to the DOJ report, the indictment further alleges the defendant acted knowing that her transmission of the record outside DOJ directly violated the court order and impaired the proper administration of the underlying criminal prosecution.

Still furious on Monday, apparently, Trump’s DOJ asked Trump’s vetted ally in U.S. District court to come down hard on Lineberger alleging to Cannon that her crimes are also a violation of the Cannon’s court order putting in place an injunction that has been protecting Trump from Smith’s embarrassing information since the start of 2025 and Trump's second term as president.

"This Notice is provided to disclose this alleged violation of the Order by a now-former Department of Justice employee to enable this Honorable Court to consider further action and sanction as deemed appropriate," the filing said.

“This Notice is provided to disclose this alleged violation of the Order by a now-former Department of Justice employee to enable this Honorable Court to consider further action and sanction as deemed appropriate,” the attorney’s argue.

It is up to Cannon to act — but if she does it will be an ironic slap to an alleged document thief who stole records related to Trump's own theft of documents case.

Lineberger has pleaded not guilty to theft, record alteration, and concealment charges,” reports Law and Crime.

Hard-right groups have expanded their influence inside the Trump administration, a new report on hate and extremism by the Southern Poverty Law Center finds, according to The Guardian. A federal grand jury indicted the SPLC, a civil rights organization, on federal fraud charges earlier this year — months before the report’s publication.

“2025 was a turbulent year marked by injustice, social upheaval and stark new threats from a hard-right movement rapidly establishing its power across institutions,” reads the director’s note to the SPLC’s “2025 Year in Hate and Extremism” series. “The hard right effectively seized the power of government as a messenger for extremist rhetoric and a tool to dictate policies affecting the everyday lives of millions of people.”

The Trump administration “radically” shifted policy to favor hard-right and extremists, claims the report titled “Empowering Extremists,” which was published Tuesday as part of the series.

The report found that the Trump administration has “shifted the focus of federal law enforcement away from violent crime investigations to sweeping immigration raids through American communities, targeting undocumented people as well as Black and Brown people — often regardless of immigration status and absent any suspicion of a violent offense.”

It states that on Sept. 22, 2025, “Trump issued an overly broad, vague executive order designating ‘antifa’ — a term often applied to people and community-based organizations opposing white supremacy, racism and the far right more generally — as a domestic terrorist organization.”

The Guardian noted that the SPLC report “pointed to conservative influencer Andy Ngo, who told Trump during a roundtable in October that ‘perhaps the state department should designate Antifa … a foreign terrorist organization.'”

“Would you like to see it done?” Trump replied. “You think it would help? I’d be glad to do it. I think it’s the kind of thing I’d like to do. Does everybody agree? If you agree, I agree. Let’s get it done.”

Trump “kept his promise,” the SPLC noted. “In November 2025, the State Department named four left-wing militant groups as foreign terrorist organizations.”

The report stated that the Trump administration’s “law enforcement shifts make Americans less safe,” and its actions increase the “threat posed by far-right extremism.”

“The administration gutted efforts to tackle hard-right extremism and downplayed — and even defended — the threat of right-wing extremist violence,” the report alleges. For example, the DOJ “removed a June 2024 peer-reviewed study from its website that concluded that far-right attacks continue ‘to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.'”

A self-identified pro-free speech Ohio state senator sent an Ohio gossip blogger to jail for sending a text message that compared the Republican to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini — and included a sexually explicit image of the Dreamworks cartoon character Shrek.

“D.J. Byrnes—an Ohio blogger who runs a Statehouse gossip Substack called The Rooster—was arrested on a misdemeanor warrant at the Ohio Statehouse,” observed Reason’s Meagan O’Rourke on Tuesday. “Byrnes' arrest, according to reporting by Signal Ohio, likely stems from a picture he texted to state Sen. Jerry Cirino (R–Kirtland) on May 6. The offending image? A ‘digitally altered version of Shrek, the ogre with a titular children's movie franchise, with his p---- exposed,’ according to Signal Ohio.”

O’Rourke added, “Police records did not identify Cirino by name, but the outlet confirmed he was the ‘recipient of the text messages based on the text messages themselves and other details within the police report.’” The affidavit described Shrek as engaged in a sexual act in the image, and added that the text exchange also showed Byrnes allegedly calling Cirino “Young Mussolini.”

Cirino reportedly responded by telling the Kirkland police, "Not only is the message harassing but the disgusting picture is pornographic in nature and not something I want to see on any of my devices.” Byrnes was arrested on June 1st and spent 23 hours in custody at the Franklin County Jail before getting released on bond. The writer says he believes he will be found innocent of the telecommunications harassment charges, although if he is not he could face up to six months in jail.

The charges against Byrnes offer a twist in Cirino’s career, as he has previously depicted himself as a staunch supporter of free speech. In a Facebook post in April 2025, Cirino praised The City Club of Cleveland by arguing that it “provides a public forum where people of diverse backgrounds and ideologies can freely share their viewpoints, have important conversations and create lasting, meaningful relationships.” He then added that he shares those ideals, having “dedicated most of my remarks to legislation I sponsored that aims to preserve and uphold intellectual freedom and diversity at Ohio's colleges and universities.”

Cirino sponsored an ultimately-successful bill, SB1, that banned so-called “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion” policies from Ohio colleges and universities.

“We want every student in Ohio, regardless of race, gender, or religion, to be able to pursue

their choice of post-secondary education,” Cirino said about the legislation. “However, DEI programs are inherently discriminatory and cannot be tolerated or paid for by taxpayers.”

President Donald Trump is reviving the Lavender Scare, an infamous period in American history that began in the 1950s and led to the widespread persecution of members of the LGBTQ community.

“A defining feature of the mid-20th century was the government-wide panic over communism, anarchism, and other leftist beliefs known as the Red Scare,” wrote ACLU Social Editor Hanna Stolzer on Tuesday. “However what many don’t know is that an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 government employees were fired or forced to resign during that same time period, solely because they were suspected or confirmed to be queer. This purge of queer people from government jobs further instilled distrust of the LGBTQ community by the general public under the guise of protecting national security. It’s called the Lavender Scare.”

Stolzer elaborated on how, much as Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) persecuted left-wingers and other political dissidents as communists, he also led a panic against homosexuals by arguing that LGBTQ people would be susceptible to blackmail by the Soviet Union. Ordinary citizens were encouraged to report displays of supposedly “homosexual behavior,” often following procedures pioneered by a McCarthyist senator from the other party, Sen. Charley E. Johns (D-FL).

Now Trump is following the same path trod in the 1950s by the likes of McCarthy and Johns.

“Taking a page from the Johns Committee playbook 70 years later,the FBI opened a tip line in June 2025 and requested people report teachers who ‘promote gender ideology’ and providers of gender-affirming care,” Holzer wrote. “And just last month, the Department of Justice attempted to force health care providers to hand over the identities and sensitive information of transgender youth who have received gender-affirming care. This is a blatant violation of the trans youth and their families’ right to privacy. The ACLU is suing the Trump administration to block this effort in court.”

He added, “These directives have far-reaching effects: They turn neighbor against neighbor, incentivize people to surveil children, and normalize the restriction of safe and critical health care. States across the country support this agenda by introducing laws that criminalize or push health care out of reach for many trans kids. Along with our affiliates, the ACLU is fighting these attacks.”

The ACLU scholar elaborated that Trump has focused on pushing LGBTQ people out of the Armed Services and public education.

“Today, the Trump administration consistently suggests ‘gender ideology’ is a threat to children and his idealized vision of the nuclear family, claiming ‘the evil and backwards lies of gender insanity are robbing our children of their happiness, health, and freedom, while imposing unimaginable heartbreak on parents and families,’” Holzer wrote. “They’ve censored doctors, researchers, educators, artists, and government workers from even mentioning the existence of transgender people, all while restricting the freedom of families with transgender youth. It is not a particularly new or novel strategy to disguise fear of LGBTQ people as coming from a need to ‘protect children,’ often bolstered by dangerous lies about the LGBTQ community.”

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2023, Dr. Gillian Frank, who studies religion, sexuality and gender at Princeton University, explained that Trump and his supporters spread misinformation falsely accusing LGBTQ people of being disproportionately prone to being child molesters in order to smear them and validate persecuting them.

“A few things happen if we deploy this idea that our opponents are out to sexually harm children, to sexually molest and violently assault them,” Frank told Salon. It associates LGBTQ people with a terrible evil, triggers parental instincts to protect their children and deflects from legitimate questions about social justice.

“One of the things we need to understand about this smear is the ways in which it is deployed to not talk about the issues of social equality, economic equality, the status of people’s citizenship and recognition, their right to privacy or protection,” Frank said. “We’re shifting it away from all those things — rights of women, equal rights of black people, which promoted the idea that there was a sexual danger to children by virtue of granting civil rights — has been this long-standing trope.”

According to a former pro-Trump lawmaker, President Donald Trump’s greatest legacy is being a sore loser — and he is eroding American democracy by spreading that mindset to other Republicans.

“I've said repeatedly — ad nauseam — that Donald Trump's greatest legacy is the destruction of truth,” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) said in a podcast posted on Tuesday. “Not a surprise, right, when this good, great, decent country puts into the White House twice somebody who lies every time he opens his mouth.

Walsh continued that Trump’s “greatest legacy is not winning twice and not getting to the White House twice. His greatest legacy — you want to understand Donald Trump's greatest legacy?

Here it is: Sixty — depending on the poll you look at — 60, 70, 80, 90 percent of one of our two major political parties believes right now that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. That right there is Trump's legacy. That right there is Trump's greatest legacy.”

Walsh pointed out that it imperils democracy for a “vast majority” of one of America’s two major parties to believe that whenever their candidate loses, it means the other candidate was cheating.

“When you look at what's happening in California since their primary election last week, it just reaffirms this point,” Walsh explained. “It expands Trump's legacy. Not only is Donald Trump's greatest legacy — and none of this is good — his greatest legacy is the destruction of truth. His greatest legacy is that he has turned the Republican Party into a party of sore losers, into a party of election deniers, into a party of democracy haters. Trump's greatest legacy is convincing Republicans not to accept the results of elections where their candidate loses. His greatest legacy is convincing Republicans that every time their side loses, it was rigged, it was stolen. Trump did that. Trump turned the Republican Party into that. A party that, when they lose now, never lost — it was stolen.”

While he added that “this is so easy to make fun of,” Walsh finds it difficult to do so “because I can think of nothing more destructive that Trump has done than convincing one of our two political parties not to accept election losses. I can't think of anything more destructive to our democracy that Trump has done than that.”

Prior to Trump, every president who lost an election peacefully relinquished power, tracing all the way back to President John Adams in 1800. Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, Harvard law professor and Trump impeachment defense attorney Alan Dershowitz cited this precedent in denying that Trump would try to overturn the 2020 election if he lost.

“No president will refuse to step down if his opponent is elected in his place,” Dershowitz told Salon at the time. “It just will not happen, and the American public would never tolerate it.”

Despite Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, conservative commentator and former presidential adviser George F. Will broke down in February how Trump’s claims have been thoroughly debunked, including by many Republicans such as his own attorney general, Bill Barr, and his own vice president, Mike Pence.

“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 explained. “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 continued, “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.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

In May, discussing Trump’s being a sore loser, Walsh said that he believed the president became unforgivable “the very first time in American history, a sitting American president lost an election and refused to accept the result. I still believe to this day the American people, all of us, no matter anyone's politics, should have turned their backs on him — all of us — and told him to just get the hell out of our lives. We're done with you. That's the one thing. Because it's the thread by which this representative democracy hangs together, keeps it together.”

Walsh added, “Six years later, what still saddens me more than anything else is that the American people did not make him pay for that. The American people did not hold him accountable for that. The American people did not stand up and say: ‘oh my f — — God, this doesn't happen in America. You're running for Congress, you're running for the Senate, you're running for mayor, you're running for dog catcher, you're running for president — man, woman, whoever you are, you accept the result. You lose, you accept the result.’ Get out of here!”