Trump has a story ready to help him undermine the election results

Republicans have long used the idea of ​​immigrants voting illegally to justify voter suppression efforts, such as requiring voters to show state-issued identification at polling places. But the more recent twist is to devise a scheme they say is being led by Democrats to use recently arrived immigrants to commit (nonexistent) voter fraud, sometimes leveraging the work of groups that help recently arrived immigrants, and capitalizing on the power of social media to make the lie sound louder than the truth. Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, has a history of this sort of narrative, part of how he’s also championed far-right “great replacement” conspiracy theories — the idea that white voters who are U.S. citizens are being deliberately “replaced” by immigrants and people of color. “Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans,” a Vance running for U.S. Senate in 2022 campaign advertisement went, “with more illegal drugs and more Democratic voters flooding into this country.” As my colleague Greg Sargent noted at the time, Vance suggested that “‘Democratic voters’ in the form of migrants are a factor that is ‘killing Ohioans.’ That’s partly a reference to drugs crossing the border, but the hint is at an apocalyptic demographic “The threat is clear.” In August, at a campaign rally in North Carolina, Vance put it as succinctly as anyone in that campaign could, only now about Harris: “Her party wants more power, and the way they’re going to do that is by giving all these illegal aliens the right to vote.”

Trump’s fictions about immigrants have become increasingly fantasmagorical, such as Tuesday night’s fabricated tales of immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets. But there’s a similar distortion of reality when he talks about election fraud: In several cases, what he seems to be describing might more accurately be described as legal efforts to hold him accountable for abuse of power.

At a Wisconsin meeting on september 7 trump hit the road tirade regarding Aurora, Colorado. Trump claimed that entire apartment complexes in Colorado were being run by what he described as gangs from Venezuela — a preview, he said, for the rest of us. “You haven’t seen the migrant crime yet; it’s started and it’s vicious.” But Colorado has another special meaning for Trump. He continued“Colorado started threatening democracy against me when they tried to unconstitutionally remove me from the ballot… and then they said I was a threat to democracy, think about that.” From there, Trump went on to more much reported part of his comments that seemed to promise bloodshed: “In Colorado, they’re so brazen that they’ve taken over parts of the state, and you know, getting them out is going to be a bloody story, they should never have been allowed in our country.”