Donald Trump’s Latest Rage-Tweets Indicate He’s Already Preparing to Lose in November

After facing an incredibly low rally turnout in Tulsa, Oklahoma this weekend, Donald Trump seems to be taking steps to preemptively delegitimize the November election. He tweeted a prediction Monday that the election will be “rigged” by “foreign countries, and others” planning to print out “millions of mail-in ballots.”

That totally baseless scenario, he wrote, “will be the scandal of our times.”

Trump has been attacking mail-in voting for months but his post-Tulsa tweets are really accelerating the conspiracy theory that Democrats and foreign powers are going to steal the election via the mail. It reeks of panic.

Trump appears to be setting the groundwork to contest the election if/when he loses. Attorney General William Barr has been backing Trump up in his false predictions of illegitimacy, telling Fox News this weekend that mail-in voting “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud.”

These claims that mail-in voting will lead to massive fraud aren’t based in reality. All-mail voting (where every registered voter is mailed a ballot) and absentee voting (where a registered voter can request a ballot by mail) are really secure systems with safeguards intact to make sure they stay that way. Opponents like to point out that voting by mail is the system of voting with the highest amount of fraud, which is technically true, but it still only results in an infinitesimal number of fraudulent ballots.

Trump, who has voted by mail multiple times over the years, likely knows this. But he’s not trying to win the November election on merit. He’s relying on his tried-and-true methods of disinformation, voter suppression, and repeating a lie until it sticks.

(image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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