Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is no recent convert to Donald Trump’s gospel of the Big Lie; after the 2020 election, Johnson led 100 House Republicans in filing an amicus brief supporting an effort to invalidate the results of four swing states President Joe Biden won. So it was little surprise to see him standing next to Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, trying to link election conspiracy-mongering to immigration fear-mongering.
Johnson and Trump were there to propose new legislation restricting noncitizen voting, even though it is already illegal and incredibly rare. The speaker spun out a familiar and ugly fiction, claiming that as part of a plot engineered by Democrats, huge numbers of immigrants are entering the U.S. illegally and registering to vote. Democrats, Johnson said, “want to turn these people” — undocumented immigrants — “into voters.” This is a version of the white supremacist “Great Replacement” theory, which says that there is a conspiracy afoot to bring in a wave of nonwhite foreigners to replace the people Tucker Carlson calls “legacy Americans.”
As long as election denial is a requirement for winning a GOP nomination, the party will continue to nominate weak candidates.
The continued effort by Trump and his allies to convince rank-and-file Republicans that any election they don’t win must be fraudulent is a profound threat to American democracy. But there’s another aspect to it that has gotten much less attention: As a political strategy, it’s absolutely harebrained.
As we saw in 2020, when courts continually rejected Trump’s efforts to stop election counts or get results overturned, these attempts never succeed beyond making election workers’ lives miserable. Whether it was Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, or anywhere else, Trump tried and failed to get his losses overturned, and if and when he does the same in 2024, he’ll fail again.
Nevertheless, he has succeeded in persuading Republicans that the election…
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