What We Found When We Investigated Trump’s Latest Election Theft Claim

You’re never gonna believe it. . .

The Cook Political Report is out this morning with a midterms vibe check, and Democrats have to like what they see: Across the 36 competitive districts most likely to decide control of the House of Representatives, “Democrats hold a six-point advantage on the generic congressional ballot, 50 percent to 44 percent,” the authors write. “Voters here are deeply frustrated with Trump and are willing to overlook their antipathy to Democrats in order to put a check on the president.”

Maybe the resistance party should give up on restoring their battered reputation and just lean in. “Vote Blue: Odds Are You Hate Us Less.” Happy Thursday.

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(Joshua Roberts/Getty Images)

Old Man Yells ‘Rigged Election’

by Andrew Egger

It’s remarkable that it’s become so unremarkable to say: Yesterday, the president of the United States claimed that an election outcome he disliked had been the result of election fraud.

“A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!” Trump fumed . “All day long Republicans were winning, the Spirit was unbelievable, until the very end when, of course, there was a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop!’ Where have I heard that before—and the Democrats eked out another Crooked Victory!”

Even in the crowded catalog of Trump’s bogus fraud claims, this one stands out as laughable. The entire substance of the claim is that the election was fraudulent because Virginia’s biggest counties, with the most votes to count, took the longest to count them. “Longest” being a relative term: the race had been called within two hours of polls closing.

Yet even within that two-hour window, some Trump allies were already laying the predicate for Trump’s argument: “New Virginia election results show opposition to the Democrats’ redistricting plan now leading 53% to 46%,” Laura Loomer’s show account Loomer Unleashed tweeted at 7:49 p.m. Tuesday. “However, Democrat controlled Fairfax County, one of Virginia’s most populated counties, still refuses to release its election results. Sadly, a swing could be coming soon.”

But at no point had allegations of misconduct come from any actual on-the-ground Republicans. No one in the Fairfax County GOP alleged any funny business yesterday. Party Chair Katie Gorka—wife of C-list Trumpworld figure Sebastian Gorka—decried the Democrats’ “hollow, shameful victory,” but made no allegations of fraud. When I reached out to the county party to get her response to Trump’s allegation, she did not reply. I live in Fairfax County, so just for fun I swung by the party office to see if anyone there had heard about any fraud: the friendly pair of front-desk volunteers I talked to, Bob and Nancy Hoyler, said that “we haven’t really heard anything about that.” (Then again, Bob added, “they never tell us anything.”)

Nor were the White House or the Republican National Committee eager even to attempt to substantiate Trump’s claims. When I asked where specifically the president was claiming fraudulent votes had been counted, a White House press aide simply referred me back to his post. RNC spokeswoman Kiersten Pels, by contrast, pivoted to attacking the fairness of the gerrymander—again without touching the substance of Trump’s claim.

“46 percent of Virginians voted Republican in the last federal election, yet Democrats are rigging the system to cling to power and silence voters they can’t win over,” Pels said. “This map is an unconstitutional partisan power grab designed to disenfranchise millions of voters and tilt the playing field.”

Hey guys! Your boss doesn’t just think the measure was unfair! He thinks Democrats literally dropped in fraudulent votes and stole the election! Isn’t anyone going to look into this?

Figuring out what to make of all this requires us to hold two ideas in friction at once. On the one hand, this is all faintly silly old-man-yells-at-cloud stuff. Trump’s brain is so cooked that he immediately believes that literally any election result that fails to go his way must have been the result of fraud—to the point where even his own aides seem faintly embarrassed at having to cover for him.

And yet we can’t ignore the fact that he’s managed to pull a large chunk of the country and all the dizzying powers of the federal government down into his own mania as well. It’s difficult to overstate just how widespread truly kooky election-integrity beliefs have become within Trump’s GOP: Just this week, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 46 percent of voters, including 82 percent of Republicans, and 38 percent of independents, think there are “large numbers of fraudulent ballots cast by non-citizens in U.S. elections.”

What Trump and his allies have created over the years is a self-sustaining and self-reinforcing base of electoral nihilists. In past cycles, convincing such people that the fix was in usually required the mass propagation of specific lies: rigged voting machines from Venezuela, 2,000 Mules-style ballot-stuffing operations, batches of phony ballots snuck into the count by dastardly poll workers. But now this crowd’s cynicism has achieved orbital velocity; it no longer requires additional thrust. When Trump points at any given election and shouts “rigged!”, he no longer needs anything resembling a smoking gun: A giant chunk of the electorate is ready to go along.

Six years ago, Donald Trump attempted the most brazen theft of a presidential election in our lifetimes—a full-court legal and extralegal press to deny his defeat and stay in the White House that culminated in a deadly riot in the U.S. Capitol. And he keeps taking actions to remind us explicitly of his total lack of remorse: Pardoning every January 6th criminal, pursuing criminal charges against those who stood in the way of his theft attempt, enforcing a government-wide soft ban on anybody acknowledging that he actually lost.

We’re not going to see a “Stop the Steal” effort in Virginia, where the president and his allies actually have a decent chance of defeating the new gerrymander in court. (Yesterday, a circuit court judge gave them an early victory in a decision blocking the map from going into effect; Democrats, of course, are appealing.) But every stupid, baseless allegation of fraud the president makes should be another flashing warning sign. He’s tried it before. He’d do it again.

The gang returns to California for two live shows in May. Join Sarah, Tim, and Sam in San Diego on May 20 or in L.A. on May 21 for a night of politics and laughs, and a community built on good faith. Bulwark Live: California is sure to sell out—don’t delay.

The King, the Tyrant, and Jeffrey Epstein

by Jordan Ferdman

On Monday, the king and queen consort of England will visit the United States to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence. If Trump and King Charles III want to talk politics, they can discuss the Anglo-American special relationship and the important role each country plays in the policies of the other. If they wanted to keep it light, they could talk about Scotland, where Trump owns golf clubs and Charles III is, well, the king. One topic they likely won’t broach, though, is the one that offers the starkest juxtaposition of the United States and the former mother country: our leaders implicated in the Epstein files.

Powerful and influential men of many lands found their names in the Epstein files, but the United States has been singularly lenient in its handling of those implicated. The embarrassing contrast between the United States and the United Kingdom is worth pausing on.

In short: King Charles threw his younger brother to the wolves. Trump can’t even bring himself to fire Howard Lutnick.

Former Prince Andrew’s arrest in February marked the most significant development in the Epstein case since the conviction and imprisonment of Epstein’s longtime accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. It was the first time since 1647—more than a hundred years before American independence—that a senior British royal had been arrested. And just in case there was any ambiguity about how Charles felt about his brother’s alleged crimes, he unceremoniously stripped Andrew of his titles and honors.¹

In Virginia Giuffre’s memoir recounting her experience as a survivor of Epstein’s trafficking, she wrote that Andrew behaved “as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright.” It’s likely Andrew did believe it, and maybe even likelier that he believed that his birthright was both to commit the crime and to evade punishment for it. Charles III, an hereditary monarch whose coronation included his anointment with holy oil symbolizing his divine right to rule, made clear to Andrew that abusing people is not, in fact, Andrew’s birthright. Andrew thought—perhaps with good reason—that the law was something that applied only to other people. For nearly 400 years, that might not have been a bad bet.

At its core, the American experiment rejected the premise of unchecked, absolute power. “Governments,” proclaimed the Declaration of Independence, “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed”—not from birthright.

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,” accused the Founders in reference to King George III, Charles III’s great-great-great-great-grandfather. But today it’s the American president who has “in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States”—including by extending more sympathy and dignity to the men implicated in the files than to the girls they abused.

The contrast between Trump and Charles III inverts American exceptionalism in the ugliest way. We should not be exceptionally indifferent to our leaders’ transgressions and crimes. We should not be exceptionally tolerant of sex trafficking and child rape.

As we prepare to celebrate our milestone birthday, we ought to—maybe with gritted teeth—embrace the irony of this discrepancy in accountability. Across the pond, a prince, stripped of his titles and banished from the palace, was arrested for his affiliations with Jeffrey Epstein. At home, our aspiring king directs the most shameful coverup in American history from the Resolute Desk.

—Jordan Ferdman is a researcher at Longwell Partners.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Putin’s Propagandists Scramble to Respond to Celeb Critic… ‘The common people are afraid of you’—and they’re angry, too, reports CATHY YOUNG.

• Who Sees Vivek at Ohio State? Standard MAGAs, America First groypers, internet trolls, and a mime duo—that’s who, as JIM SWIFT reports from Columbus.

• Can Trump Avoid Humiliation in Iran? On the flagship pod, SAM STEIN joins TIM MILLER to discuss Trump’s humiliation, share their new cabinet rankings, and wonder: Is there a way to stop Kushner from making deals with Sharia law countries?

• Trump’s AWFUL Polls, GOP’s Gerrymander Faceplant, WHCD Drama… KATIE COURIC joins JVL and BILL KRISTOL to talk about Trump’s dismal approval polling, the GOP’s failed attempt to gain an edge in the House via gerrymandering, and the upcoming White House Correspondents Dinner.

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Quick Hits

NEVER SAY NEVER: Even in our deeply stupid era, the idea that Donald Trump might pardon Jeffrey Epstein associate and convicted sex criminal Ghislaine Maxwell seems almost too preposterous even to contemplate. And yet, well, here’s the GOP chair of the House Oversight Committee frankly admitting many of his own members are in favor of such a thing, per Politico:

Members on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are divided over whether President Donald Trump should pardon Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for her cooperation in the panel’s Epstein investigation, Chair James Comer said in an interview Wednesday. . . . When asked whether he believed it was a favorable deal to issue a pardon in return for Maxwell’s testimony, Comer said, “A lot of people do.”

“My committee’s split on that,” he added, declining to name who on the panel supported granting a pardon. “I don’t speak for my committee.”

Comer himself, for the record, disapproves. Read the whole thing.

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STRAITJACKETED: And now for your regular vibe check, courtesy of the New York Times, on the Strait of Hormuz:

The number of ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz has become a barometer of how the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is affecting the global economy. On Tuesday, after nearly eight weeks of war, that number was one, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Then Wednesday, more ships tried and Iran attacked two cargo vessels in the strait.

“They are reminding us that their threats to attack ships are genuine, and that’s enough to suppress traffic through the strait,” said Rosemary Kelanic, a director at Defense Priorities, a research organization focused on foreign affairs. Ships linked to Iran have passed through the strait, ship tracking data shows.

The problem for the United States and the world is the same as ever: Iran doesn’t actually need to be able to exercise control over every ship passing through the strait to keep it in a state of near-permanent stasis. All they have to do is stroll out every few days or so and shoot at some craft that’s trying to transit without their permission—which is enough to raise the risk of transiting above what shipping companies find acceptable.

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Cheap Shots

1. Andrew remains eighth in the line of succession to the throne.