Get Ready for November’s ‘Stop the Steal’

Republicans’ reactions to the Los Angeles mayoral race preview their reactions to the midterms.

After first taking time this morning (naturally) to denounce some of his cable news critics,¹ Donald Trump got around to letting us know he may shortly order a resumption of major hostilities against Iran: “Iran is all talk and no action,” he posted. “They’ve taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”

Apropos of nothing, it was ninety days ago that Trump had this to say about Operation Epic Fury: “We’ve won. Let me tell you, we’ve won. You never like to say too early you won—we won. We won. In the first hour it was over. We won.” Happy Wednesday.

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Mark Hertling and Ben Parker will be live on Substack and YouTube at 10:30 a.m. EDT today for Command Post.

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(Photo illustration by The Bulwark / Photos: Getty)

The Catechism of the Stolen Election

by Andrew Egger

These days, Donald Trump reflexively denounces any election result he dislikes as stolen and fraudulent. But it doesn’t always catch on. In April, Republicans seemed faintly embarrassed by his claim that Virginia’s redistricting referendum had been a “rigged election” and “crooked victory” after Democrats executed a phony “mail-in ballot drop”; few wanted to defend it on the merits, and the president let the matter drop.

But last week’s mayoral primary in Los Angeles is going the opposite direction: Trump’s claim last week that “there’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California” is catching on. Conservative commentators have embraced the allegation en masse. So have lawmakers: “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday. “But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here.”

Sen. Mike Lee suggested North Korea had a more reliable voting system than California. Rep. Tim Burchett insisted “they” had rigged the election against the Republican-coded candidate. Sen. Ron Johnson argued that the absence of evidence of fraud was itself evidence of fraud: “People who do things cover it up.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis accused California of “dumping votes” until “you get the result you want.”

What had happened to get these guys so riled up? As the ballots were counted, progressive challenger Nithya Raman, who had been in third place in the early stages of the counting process, gradually caught up to and passed conservative candidate Spencer Pratt to advance to the runoff against incumbent Karen Bass.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Voters who voted in a certain way—by mailing in ballots at or near the deadline—turned out to be more pro-Raman than early mail-in voters or same-day voters had been. This is the smoking gun that has Republicans everywhere crying “fraud.”

As always, these allegations fall apart at the slightest touch. Why should we find it fishy that Pratt finished up pretty much exactly where polls suggested he would? Why would Bass, who is running for re-election, deliberately scheme to boost a strong Democratic opponent who could beat her in the runoff rather than a Republican she would crush with zero effort? Why is it more “suspicious” that late mail-in voters were disproportionately progressive than it was that same-day voters were disproportionately conservative?

But these counterarguments shouldn’t even matter. Because the simple fact is there’s nothing to argue against. Nobody denouncing the race has pointed to specific supposed examples of malfeasance; it’s simply the result itself that’s supposedly suspicious.

This is a change from 2020. The original “Stop the Steal” effort was lousy with cooked-up anecdotes of scurrilous election-official behavior. They’re pulling boxes of phony ballots out from under the table in Atlanta! They’re giving Republicans ballot-spoiling Sharpies on purpose in Phoenix! They’re re-scanning the same batch of ballots repeatedly in Detroit! The voting machine companies are deliberately switching ballots from Trump to Biden—and we’ve got the proof!

Each of these stories was quickly debunked, but they served their purpose at the time: They generated an overwhelming sense in the minds of MAGA voters that something fishy was going on. Even if this or that individual story fell apart under scrutiny, they couldn’t all be invented, could they? Without the wide dissemination of these anecdotes, Trump wouldn’t have found nearly as much success convincing his base he’d had a presidential election stolen from him.

What we’re seeing now is that this legwork is no longer needed. So thoroughly poisoned are the minds of Trump’s base voters by now that they no longer need to see even pretend evidence to believe his claims that this or that election are rigged. For the election to turn out more Democrat-friendly than they expected is all they need.

This is really bad news for a few reasons. One involves accountability. After 2020, media companies that simply pumped their MAGA viewers’ brains full of vague unease about the outcome didn’t run into any trouble. It was the ones that parroted specific and defamatory stolen-election claims that got burned—most famously in Dominion Voting Systems’ enormous lawsuit against Fox News. If the specific false claims are no longer necessary to convince the base the fix is in, we lose our biggest proven weapon for holding election liars accountable.

Meanwhile, it becomes clearer every day: The GOP base is going to go along with Trump on any major election he decides to claim is fraudulent this November. All it will take, again, is for Democrats to do better than they expected. And what Republican base voter is expecting a blue wave? Trump is going to do this, and they’re going to fall in line. Somehow, some people will be surprised by this. Don’t be among them.

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Stop the Arch

by William Kristol

Last night, President Trump had the White House colorfully and dramatically lit up.

Was it a belated recognition of D-Day, whose anniversary Trump had ignored on June 6? No.

Was it a commemoration of the day 250 years ago when the Continental Congress appointed a committee to draft a declaration of independence? No.

Trump has no interest in wars against fascism or declarations of human equality and liberty.

What Trump is interested in is self-aggrandizing spectacle and personal grift. And so last night’s garish lighting display was to illuminate the Ultimate Fighting Championship arena now set up on the White House South Lawn, which will be the venue for the cage matches to take place on Trump’s eightieth birthday Sunday.

It’s all grotesque.

But even more grotesque to my eyes is the gigantic 250-foot triumphal arch Trump wants to have built on Memorial Circle, interrupting the vista from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington Cemetery.

I hadn’t been able to put my finger on just why, of all Trump’s offenses to good taste and American history, it’s the arch that bothers me the most, until I read the excellent testimony of Holly Berkley Fletcher, a friend of and occasional contributor to The Bulwark, at a recent hearing of the National Capitol Planning Commission.

Here’s the crux of what Holly told the commission:

I strongly object to the building of the proposed arch because it is an affront to the history and meaning of the site.

In 1864, General Montgomery Meigs made a deliberate decision to bury Union dead at the Arlington estate of his former friend and mentor, Robert E. Lee, whom he considered a traitor to the United States. Meigs wanted to send a message, both to Lee personally and to the nation, about the rebellion’s high moral and human cost.

Decades later, the Macmillan Commission approved a long overdue architectural plan for Washington based on the original design of Charles Pierre L’Enfant, who, notably, is also buried at Arlington, in the section visible from Washington.

The Lincoln Memorial was purposefully placed in the direct sightline of Lee’s home and the graves of the first Union soldiers buried there, with the Memorial Bridge connecting the two, as a symbol of union, reconciliation, and the high price of freedom. This site was never meant to be triumphal, but rather somber, reflective, and profound, much like Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural and Gettysburg Addresses, which are etched into the walls of his memorial.

And Holly concluded on a more personal note:

I am also a former CIA Africa analyst who was raised in Kenya under a dictatorial regime. This arch reminds me more of the bombastic, self-aggrandizing displays of the African strongmen I have observed than the expression of a mature, dignified democracy whose greatness has been proven over time through the fulfillment of and fidelity to its founding principles.

I don’t know if those, like Holly, standing athwart Trump’s arch yelling ‘Stop,’ will succeed. Trump really wants it to happen. On June 6, he boasted that “The Triumphal Arch . . . will be, along with the White House Ballroom, the Greatest Structure in Washington.” Today, the Washington Post reports that federal officials at Trump’s direction are hurrying to begin construction of the arch. Indeed, “the administration envisions 20 hours per day of construction on the arch, year-round, in hopes of completing the project within two to three years.”

But veterans groups in particular are fighting valiantly against it as a desecration of Arlington Cemetery, and there are other arenas—including other federal agencies, the courts, and Congress—in which the struggle to stop it will continue.

But even if the arch isn’t stopped now, the fight against it can lay the groundwork for removing it as soon as possible after January 20, 2029. The day the arch is taken down will be a fitting occasion for the next president to light up the White House, this time to mark the restoration of fidelity to the nation’s founding principles.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Bulwark Book Club: Join MONA CHAREN and MARK HERTLING as they discuss his book, If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal.

• How the Libertarian Party De-MAGAfied Itself… And could Republicans ever follow suit? BERNARD TAMAS explains.

• Sorry, That’s the Wrong Kind of ‘Invasion’... Team Trump keeps mum about Russia’s attack on Ukraine—but fixates on how immigrants ‘threaten’ Europe’s future, writes WILL SALETAN.

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Quick Hits

COST OF LIVING. IT’S A THING: Donald Trump came into office pledging to bring down prices, particularly energy prices. But a year and a half later, it’s fair to say that he’s been an abject failure on this front. The latest data point came this morning as the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index showed inflation rising at a 4.2 percent pace year-over-year. This is the first time that the CPI has crossed 4 percent in three years. And while the main driver of it is transitory, Trump is clearly to blame for it: Gas is up because of his war in Iran. While this might be a major political nuisance for the president, it’s a professional Catch-22 for new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. Warsh got the job by embracing Trump’s demand to lower interest rates. He would never have been able to do so without the approval of the Fed board. But now, with inflation at this level, it seems silly for him even to try.

—Sam Stein

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ICE RE-FUNDED: After months of congressional deadlock, ICE and the Border Patrol are about to be funded again. Here’s NBC News:

After weeks of setbacks and delays, the Republican-controlled House on Tuesday narrowly passed a roughly $70 billion package to fund ICE and the Border Patrol through the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

The vote was 214–212, with Rep. Kevin Kiley, a California independent who caucuses with Republicans, joining all Democrats in voting no. The package, dubbed the Secure America Act, cleared the Senate last week and now heads to the president’s desk for his expected signature.

The successful House vote ends months of drama and partisan bickering over immigration enforcement funding. In February, Senate Democrats voted to shut down the Department of Homeland Security after the fatal shootings of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, during immigration operations in Minneapolis the previous month.

We’ve praised congressional Democrats for how they played this fight, which made Republicans’ path to re-funding the agencies that killed Pretti and Good much more politically difficult and painful, and even provided opportunities for disgruntled Republicans to confront Trump on other matters like his ballroom and his anti-weaponization fund. In the end, though, Republicans ended up shuffling back into line: The final bill contains none of the immigration-enforcement reforms demanded by Democrats and no restrictions on Trump’s ability to relaunch his J6 slush fund, should he choose to do so. No ballroom money, though.

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IT’S PLATNER: As expected, Graham Platner romped to victory in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary last night—but it wasn’t just Platner. As Politico notes, other candidates endorsed by Bernie Sanders had a good night across the board, extending a string of victories for the progressive Vermont senator:

Hours before his victory was called, Sanders-backed Randy Villegas advanced to a runoff ahead of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s endorsed candidate, as he fights to face Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) in a swingy Central Valley seat. Other Sanders-backed victors for House seats in recent weeks include Adam Hamawy and Analilia Mejia in New Jersey, Sam Forstag in Montana, Brian Poindexter in Ohio and Bob Brooks in a key Pennsylvania swing district.

Sanders stood vocally by Platner through the latest round of controversies, and his support helped bolster the progressive oyster farmer and former combat Marine through the closing stretch.

Platner heads into the general election against GOP Sen. Susan Collins following a wide margin of victory over Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who shelved her struggling campaign before Election Day, and an also-ran opponent. That may be enough to quiet at least some of the Democrats who had been angling for him to step aside.

So it goes. Now we’ll see how he does against Collins.

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AS BAD AS THEY SOUND: Beef prices are high now, and they’re likely to get worse. The New World Screwworm, a flesh-eating fly that was once the scourge of the domestic cattle industry but had been eradicated from America for decades, has been creeping back north toward the U.S. border for months. Cases are now popping up well north of the Rio Grande. Four animals carrying the parasite have now been identified in Texas; another case, the USDA announced Monday, was identified in a pet dog in New Mexico.

The screwworm, a deeply unpleasant creature that lays eggs in the wounds of mammals, which hatch into larva that eat living flesh, had been gradually eradicated by means of a huge, painstaking government intervention: the breeding and release of bazillions of sterile male screwworms into areas overrun by the pest. Since female screwworms mate only once, this program did wonders for knocking out the population in areas where it was implemented. And once they’d done it in America, they didn’t stop—scientists kept pushing the battle line against the screwworm farther and farther south into Central America.

A few years ago, though, the screwworms started breaking back through and spreading north again. The federal government and the government of Texas have been preparing for their arrival, in part by building a big new breeding facility for sterile flies outside Edinburgh, Texas. But Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sounded the alarm last week that that facility may not come online quickly enough: Without greater fly production, he said Friday, “we cannot make it through a second summer.” Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been taking heat for a different screwworm-related decision: Programs for surveillance against the parasite and for animal disease control and prevention were among the cuts implemented by DOGE at USAID and the USDA last year.

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Cheap Shots

1. Joe Scarborough, if you’re wondering, suffers from both “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “Low Ratings Disease,” and Stephen A. Smith is “an arrogant fool,” a “low IQ individual,” “dumb as a rock,” a “loudmouth huckster,” and “totally unqualified to ever think of running for high political office, or even low political office, for that matter!”