Trump saw the manner of his election defeat as a personal affront. Not only was the pausing of the ballot count on election night an assault on the constitutional rights of Americans, feeding suspicions that illegal ballots were being added to the tally to boost Joe Biden — but it was Trump who was the mark. He was cheated, and so were you, he told the 74 million Americans who voted for him, and they, too, felt the sting of a public humiliation. As I explain in my new book, Disappearing the President, Trump and his supporters were disenfranchised together in front of the whole world.

It’s an insult they haven’t forgotten. Most Americans are heading into the 2024 election convinced that the outcome will be affected by cheating. Polls show that 66% of the electorate are very or somewhat concerned that the vote will be compromised, including 55% of Democratic voters, 58% of Independents, and 83% of Republicans. The reason voters are worried, rightly, about the integrity of the coming election is because Trump has never stopped talking about the last one.

Does this mean that the 2020 vote was rigged? Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who founded the Election Integrity Network, framed the problem cautiously on social media. “The election process was taken over by leftwing activist groups who had burrowed into election systems across the country by the time of the 2020 election,” she wrote recently. “And they manipulated the election system in myriad ways in state after state.”

Perhaps the most significant of these tactics was mass mail-in voting, instituted ostensibly to accommodate voters’ concerns about public gatherings during the pandemic. Previously, Democrats and Republicans agreed that mail-in ballots facilitated fraud. A 2005 bipartisan report chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and one-time Secretary of State James Baker assessed that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud”.

But that was all memory-holed for the 2020 vote — indeed, it was censored. The Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies banned social media posts questioning the integrity of mail-in voting. The reality is that the Covid-era measures made voting by mail even more susceptible to fraud.

Previously, states required voters to file a request for a mail-in ballot and sign it. That signature was the baseline against which to check the signature on the final ballot. It was hardly a foolproof method, but it was at least a check against fraud. The Covid-era voting procedures eliminated even that. Rather than requiring voters to submit their signed requests, state election officials mailed out ballots to everyone registered to vote, which meant there was no baseline signature for comparison. The new voting system made it hard, if not impossible, to prove fraud.

And it was all done under the veil of law. No one voted to compromise the integrity of presidential elections by eliminating signature verification, but state party officials across the country took it upon themselves to send out bushels of ballots indiscriminately, while Left-wing judges turned a blind eye. Trump spoke up — then he was banished from Facebook and Twitter after the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021 turned violent. Trump took to social media to counsel his supporters to stay peaceful but was nonetheless exiled to digital Elba.

“I had no voice,” Trump told me. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said, “because I have so many things to say, and I have so many people that want to hear them, and I had no voice.” By continuing to talk about the 2020 vote long after it was possible to do anything about it, he wasn’t looking backward, as his aides feared; rather, he was mobilising his supporters for the next round. Thus, by spring 2021, he’d locked up the Republican Party’s nomination long before the primary season began two years later.

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America's future isn't fascist

By Lee Siegel

Will this election be different? Mitchell writes: “We are working hard to make sure that it does not happen again this time. We haven’t fixed everything in elections that the leftists spent billions of dollars breaking. But at least we know what to watch for in 2024.”

Federal and state officials appear determined to validate voters’ fears. California recently passed a law preventing local governments from requiring voters to present identification in order to vote. The Department of Justice has filed suits against the states of Alabama and Virginia to keep them from purging ineligible voters, including non-citizens, from its voter rolls. Investigations are underway in Pennsylvania where two counties are reporting evidence of large-scale voter registration fraud. And, according to Michigan officials, there is a “nationwide issue” with voting terminals preventing voters from making certain selections on their ballots.

It seems that, as in 2020, the 2024 election will stretch out past election day. Officials from key battleground states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, have already warned of delays in announcing results. Fox News Channel’s Decision Desk anticipates at least a four-day delay before it makes a final call. To mollify, or mislead, voters, Pennsylvania’s Department of State posted on X that “Pennsylvanians won’t always know the final results of all races on election night. Any changes in results that occur as counties continue to count ballots are not evidence that an election is ‘rigged’.”

But delaying the announcement of election results is typically seen the world over as evidence of fraud. US officials once saw it that way, too, at least up until the 2020 election when contesting election results became grounds for indicting Trump, his lawyers, and other top aides.

For instance, delays in announcing the results of the first round of Peru’s 2000 election — which included three days for the presidential race, more than a month for congressional contests, and a “mysterious” lapse in the transport of ballot boxes to vote count centres — caught the Clinton administration’s attention. A State Department spokesman warned the Peruvian government “to take every possible measure to ensure that the next round of voting fully meets democratic standards of openness, transparency and fairness”.

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The Hollywood liberals who rule America

By Frederick Kaufman

The Peruvian campaign was marked by other irregularities, too, as watchdog groups found evidence that incumbent Alberto Fujimori’s operatives had manipulated the media, forged voter registration signatures, and transported pre-marked ballots. The reason those sound like the irregularities identified in the 2020 US elections is because the distinguishing characteristics of election fraud are always the same. There are not that many ways to rig an election, and it does not take a professional election monitor to recognise fraud.

Delayed election results are correlated not only with fraud but also with violence. According to a study of African elections from 1997 to 2022: “The length of time between elections and the announcement of the official results acts as a signal of possible voter fraud, thereby increasing incentives for post-election violence.”

Likewise, paused ballot-counts and lengthy delays in announcing results in Honduras’s 2017 presidential elections led to widespread violence and 17 deaths. Here again, the US State Department took note. The irregularities, said US diplomats, indicated that “much-needed electoral reforms should be undertaken”.

Could the promised delays for this election cycle provoke further political violence? With two attempts on Trump’s life already, Kamala Harris raised the stakes when she compared him to Hitler. In a recent Atlantic article, former Trump administration officials allege that their ex-boss spoke favourably of the Führer, claims that the Harris team rolled into a press conference essentially warning against a Hitler presidency. Only Harris, her campaign promises voters, is capable of “defending democracy” — effectively the central plank in the party’s platform — against your Nazi neighbours.

The idea that Trump is a tyrant in the wings is of course absurd. But it is no more dangerous than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign propaganda claiming that Trump was controlled by Vladimir Putin. US intelligence services used that fabrication as a predicate to investigate Trump during the second year of his presidency.

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Nature is coming for America

By Mary Harrington

Through three election cycles, from 2016 to the present, the Democrats have sought to present Trump, a political outsider, as somehow fundamentally un-American. At best, the Democrats dismiss Trump’s supporters as unwitting accomplices of a foreign agent; at worst, they denounce them as collaborators in a fascist plot to undermine democracy. This has proven to be the most destructive propaganda campaign in US history. No foreign power has ever divided the American public so successfully.

The catch is that Harris doesn’t have many options. Some say the Hitler ploy is evidence that her campaign has run out of steam, but the problem is more fundamental: owning the Democratic Party’s signature policy initiative from the last four years would be disastrous. Since Biden took office in January 2021, the administration has ushered millions of illegal aliens across the southern border. Because no one is stopping the migrants from crossing and record-keeping is deliberately careless, no one knows how many have entered, though estimates range between seven and 25 million.

Even officials in Democrat-run polities such as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles are starting to have second thoughts about their status as “sanctuary cities” now that illegal aliens are exhausting their resources while also spiking crime rates. The proliferation of cheap, undocumented labour has suppressed the wages of working-class Americans or pushed them entirely out of the workforce. And because no Democrat in their right mind wants to take credit for burdening taxpayers with billions of dollars in public services for non-citizens, no one dares look into the future when automation will make millions of illiterate foreigners redundant.

Trump’s plan, the cornerstone of his campaign, is to send them back. If they want to move to America, they have to go home and start the process lawfully. In the meantime, Republicans are worried that illegal migrants are being registered to vote and their harvested ballots may help Harris win battleground states.

However, some GOP officials I’ve spoken with say there’s little evidence yet of mass registration of the Biden-Harris administration’s illegal migrants. At present, say my sources, the migrants are largely being relocated to Democrat-run states and cities, replacing Americans who vacated these areas in the last few years, driven out by draconian Covid lockdowns and mandates. These millions of Americans have left the Democratic enclaves on the East and West coast and moved to the sunbelt and other Republican-dominated regions to free themselves from the policies that have made life more dangerous and expensive. That exodus is a problem for Democrats since congressional seats are allocated according to population size. When conservative voters leave majority Democratic regions in droves as they have recently, those areas lose seats. And so, to win elections and hold power, so the theory goes, the Democrats need to keep the borders open, maybe forever.

This is why Trump supporters believe that the election will decide whether America remains a real country, with secure borders and secure elections, or is destined rather to become a tax farm for oligarchs in a geographical zone ruled by a single party. It’s no wonder Americans are on edge — Harris voters are worried that Hitler will be re-elected, and Trump supporters fear a repeat of 2020 that will lead to an unrecognisable America. Accordingly, voters are more galvanised by the electoral process than ever before, watching polls like political professionals.

Americans aren’t accustomed to this level of political urgency. For much of US history, most voters assumed that regardless of the outcome, the ship of state would rest in relatively steady hands whether it was a Democrat steering it slightly left or the Republicans charting a centre-right course. After the eight-year campaign targeting Trump, his aides and supporters, hardly anyone believes that anymore. Today, there’s little voters are willing to take for granted, including evidence of Trump’s growing lead as we head into Tuesday’s election.

Are you a Copium addict? Do you spend your days with Lola at the Cope-acobana?

Cope is one of the supreme memes of 2020. It’s the idea that certain narratives are coping mechanisms that delay a painful collision with the truth. In short, it’s an amazing way to scythe through your opponent’s discourse, to write it off as mere conspiracy. Russiagate? Dems cope. Boris being crap because he’s in Carrie’s pocket? Tory copium so pure it comes from Afghanistan.

Cope is the thinking troll’s gaslighting, and equally on its way to being memed into sheer meaninglessness. Like gaslighting, cope is in the eye of the beholder. Your cope is my rock solid evidence. Yet another meme speaking to the cracks in our basic conceptions of reality.

In 2020, being under the influence of Cope is an accusation that must constantly be swatted away by the Trump loyalists of the online Right. There, in forums, on marathon YouTube chat sessions, a very different US election has been playing out. The various State Senate hearings, only muttered-of vaguely, if at all, on terrestrial TV, are taking centre-stage. They are raked over for the merest details, like latter-day OJ Simpson trials.

It’s a universe with its own stars: men like Colonel Phil Waldron, a former military intelligence officer, who gave detailed evidence at the Arizona hearings on how, statistically, the state’s ballot tallies are wildly improbable. Then there’s the Trump litigator Jackie Pick in Georgia, who showed the hearings video evidence of two women seemingly stuffing ballots in Fulton County. Or the US Postal Service truck driver, Jesse Morgan, from New York, who has testified that he broke the law by transporting ballots across state lines, into Pennsylvania.

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QAnon is indestructible

By Gavin Haynes

The fraud was vast, but the scale of the swing to Trump took Democrat fraudsters by surprise, the narrative goes. In fact, it was such a landslide that the hacked Dominion voting machines algorithm, designed to output perhaps 13% more Biden votes than existed, couldn’t get past it. And that was why the counting stopped, so suddenly, in so many places, in the middle of the night of November 3. The classic illustration of this point being the famous ‘burst pipe’ in Fulton County: once given as the reason counting had to end suddenly, in the weeks since, it has been downgraded to “a urinal overflowing” — a twist of fate that did not impact the count.

This is a world where General Mike Flynn, Trump’s recently-pardoned former National Security Adviser, can state that he is “ten out of ten confident” that there will be a reversal in the electoral college. If any of this turns up good in court, then it’s Watergate-squared. Yet somehow, that great switcheroo always seems one tantalising court case away.

Scott Adams, Dilbert cartoonist and now hardened Trump-stumper, once famously conceived of blue and red America as watching “the same movie through different glasses”. These days, they’re in separate cinemas. These days, Adams gives hour-long vlogs, in which he discourses on Trump’s remaining paths to victory. Gently floating the thought experiment that there has never been a greater means (postal voting), nor a greater motive (defeating 21st century literal-Hitler) to commit massive electoral fraud.

Adams was one of the first people to point to Trump’s talents as a political mesmerist — in a blog he wrote in 2015 that predicted he’d win the Republican nomination “by a landslide”. A month back, in a vlog, he made another prediction: “this year America will have effectively two presidents”. Quite the claim. Yet even as the “safe harbour” date arrives — technically the moment at which the election results are sealed — it doesn’t feel as though his two presidents notion is dead in the water.

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Stop pretending the BLM protests were peaceful

By Michael Tracey

To anyone watching this scenario play out, there’s a grim fascination in seeing history’s biggest irresistible force heading towards its largest immovable object. If a massive systemic plot were to be revealed, the consequences would be so hideous it might prove better never to have known. Yet here we are, on the day the result will be certified, and it feels not as though there is a gradual deflation of expectations underway so much as a ramping-up, as the true believers await an ever-bigger deus ex machina.

Take the YouTuber Academic Agent’s Unpopular Opinions livestream. There, on Tuesday night, you could have heard the semi-popular opinion that “Trump strikes me as a wait till you see the whites of their eyes guy”. The idea being that the new court case just then breaking — Texas suing various Democrat-won states on the grounds that their new post-Covid electoral laws failed to make all states’ votes count equally — is the masterplan finally clicking into action, rather than one more salvo in an ongoing rear-guard action.

Of course, one problem with identifying cope is that the people who make the accusation against you so often do so in bad faith. Take, for instance, the conventional media, who have spent every waking hour desperately, incuriously telling us that this stuff is all, always and everywhere, false.

There may be some merit in some of Giuliani’s many cases, or they may all be meretricious. But courts are precisely the places where we test confusing claims. We’ve only just breached the 37 days it took Al Gore to concede to George W. Bush, yet the cases and hearings seem invisible. Sky, to take but one example, have so far seemed most enthused about the trajectory of Rudi Giuliani’s hair dye.

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Don't dismiss the Trump brigade

By Will Lloyd

Sometimes, you do wonder who’s coping who. A recent piece by David S. Cohen for Rolling Stone, on the Texas lawsuit, spends half its length protesting rather too much about why this one will definitely, 100%, totally-for-sure, fail. Overall, the post-election period has seen a huge acceleration of what you might call The Nigel Lawson Principle.

In 2017, Nigel Lawson was invited on the Today Programme to debate climate change against a scientist. There was an outcry. Lawson, it was argued, had no credentials in this area, yet his view was being treated as though it had equal value. The Beeb ultimately agreed (though Lawson was never speaking “as a scientist”, merely as an eminent person who had done his own reading).

From then on, a kind of precautionary principle took hold. The shepherding hand of the news media would decide not merely what was covered, but which people were “expert”, meaning inside or outside of the agreed epistemological tree of power. The Lawson Principle has meant that, increasingly, without the human equivalent of academic footnotes, you are automatically deprecated.

Silicon Valley has since embraced this principle, hard. Google “Fulton County Voter” and wait for auto-suggest. Out of a dozen answers, the one term it won’t give you is the one that is perhaps the most googled: “voter fraud”. It is happy, however, to point you to “voter suppression” — a speculative story about Republicans potentially under-registering black voters. To even find the source text — the full half-hour Fulton hearing video — on YouTube takes a certain skill, and the tenacity to wade through pages of edited ABC and CNN “debunkings”.

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What if Trump loses the election?

By Justin Webb

It doesn’t help either that the fact-checking industry is increasingly aligned to only one side, as anyone who has encountered the once-great Snopes in modern times will know. Snopes debunked a claim that Biden had lied by publicly accusing the truck driver who killed his wife and child in an auto accident of being drunk. The “definitive fact-checking site” claimed Biden’s unsusbtantiated and very public attack was actually “a mixture” because: “No definitive evidence exists to prove or rule out whether the other driver had been drinking”. Biden had “probably heard it from others in the community”.

Equally, according to the fact-checkers at CNN, the fact that Trump won 18 of the 19 bellwether counties doesn’t matter, because that could be mere statistical fluke. Fair enough. But it also sounds like precisely the kind of eyebrow-raising statistical fluke that would demand a stewards enquiry from a Nate Silver type under other circumstances.

When merely chasing a straight answer becomes a diverting, gamified internet pastime in itself, you should expect the people who bother to seek out the details to become both enchanted with the process, and convinced that something is being hidden from them. As if to illustrate this more fully, last week, YouTube announced that it would begin deleting videos that referred to anyone other than Joe Biden as President-elect after the safe harbour date. A perfect way to ensure the two screens never meet again.

But all movies end. As the window for a reversal closes, what will happen to all those who’ve stuck with the alternative narrative?

In Copeland, the supreme fantasy is that Justice Kavanagh — so wildly shellacked by the Democratic Party in his confirmation hearings — will deliver the majority verdict on the Supreme Court decision, to pronounce Trump the winner.

But if that — somehow — proves impossible, the annoying truth is that the election becomes a mere sub-plot in an ongoing arc. The average cope user can still point to a few headline facts which are indisputably true, yet also wave in the general direction of conspiracy. A makeweight like Biden now has 81 million votes. 12 million more than Obama in his epoch-making pomp. Does that feel logical?

After all, we’ve had four years of Trump Derangement Syndrome, of Russiagate, of porous impeachments, and Carole Cadwalladr retractions. Now, an equal but opposite meltdown is brewing. The only difference is that you will have to go much further out of your way before you encounter it.