We do not know if Trump will win the elections next November, although some polls give him a two-point lead. But we know what kind of day it will be. In October 2020, his plan began by declaring victory before knowing the election result. “Trump is going to enter the Oval Office to tweet: ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck that one,’” said Steve Bannon the day before the elections in a recording leaked to Mother Jones. They were going to invent a fraud, taking advantage of the foreseeable delay in postal votes to challenge the electoral defeat.
To achieve this, Trump litigated with the States and harassed officials, governors and secretaries of State to stop the counting of mail-in votes. He pressured Congress and Vice President Mike Pence to reject Biden’s victory. Bannon predicted that his statements would generate violence, and that many people would do “crazy” things to restore him to power. So it was.
“Frankly, we have won this election,” Trump said at the news conference. He asked his followers to fight “like hell” to prevent the electoral change, and thousands of people stormed the Capitol. But many failed him. There were people like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who refused to “find” enough votes to overturn the result. Judges who dismissed the lawsuits, despite having been nominated by Trump. Republican senators who voted to certify Biden’s victory, including the vice president. There were agents, officers and officials who worked to ensure the transfer of power.
Even Fox News declared Biden’s victory. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram suspended his accounts for inciting violence and civil disorder. Now, Trump enters November with the firm intention of correcting those “mistakes.” For example, he has reconfigured Georgia’s state elections board, executive branch, legislative branch, and legal ecosystems. And he is clearing obstacles like the Election Integrity Partnership.
The large pioneering project, designed in 2020 to prevent or mitigate any attempt to intervene in elections or invalidate their results in real time, has been dismantled. It was led by Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer during the 2016 election and director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, along with three other leading organizations in the fight against misinformation: the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, Graphika and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Laboratory. A campaign of harassment and lawsuits, subpoenas and document requests has exhausted the legal, financial and mental resources of academic institutions. Stamos left the project, followed by his right hand, Renee Diresta. The page announces that it “will not work on the 2024 election or future elections,” and Stanford says the Observatory will no longer work on electoral integrity.
Republican Jim Jordan’s subcommittee on the politicization of the federal government accuses them of blocking conservative speech. America First Legal, led by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, is suing them for conspiring with the government in a mass surveillance operation against the population. Meanwhile, Meta has fired its election integrity team, Twitter is radicalizing, and OpenAI has named Trump’s NSA director as its chief security officer.
