Buckle up for Trump's 2026 election denial playbook
President Donald Trump knows that recent history, older history and current polling all point to Republicans sustaining massive losses to Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. After Virginia Democrats successfully pushed through a referendum on Tuesday to gerrymander the state to their advantage, Trump publicly revealed his strategy for coping with this — election denial.“Writing on Truth Social, Trump on Wednesday claimed a ‘RIGGED ELECTION’ had taken place in Virginia despite there being absolutely no evidence of any irregularities or fraud in the conduct of the plebiscite the previous evening in which 1,575,288 voters cast ballots in favor of a constitutional amendment which permits the implementation of new districts drawn by Virginia’s Democratic-led General Assembly, bypassing an independent, bipartisan commission which has drawn district lines since 2020,” wrote The Independent's Andrew Feinberg on Wednesday.He added that the measure, which voters approved by a three-point margin without any reports of irregularities, passed by levels similar to those at which Trump lost Virginia to Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.“Trump also groused about the ballot measure’s language, calling it ‘purposefully unintelligible and deceptive,’” Feinberg reported. “‘As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum, and neither do they!’ he said.”Conservative historian Robert Kagan, who has written extensively about military history, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in February that he believes Trump plans on rigging the midterm elections so he cannot lose.“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” Kagan told Amanpour. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”Trump has a long history of denying elections when he loses them, such as the 2016 Republican Iowa caucuses, the 2016 presidential popular vote and the 2020 presidential election against Vice President Joe Biden. All of this Trump’s claims have been thoroughly analyzed by impartial experts and found baseless, especially about the 2020 election (since Trump used his loss to Biden as the basis for a coup attempt).In the 2022 report “Lost, Not Stolen,” eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists) studied all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. As right-wing columnist George F. Will later explained in The Washington Post, “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 added, “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.”