The Election Deniers’ Long Game
Updated at 6:01 p.m.
ET on September 10, 2026 In the anxious days following President Trump’s 2020 election loss—before his supporters stormed the Capitol, before his vengeful return to the White House, before the mass pardons for cop beaters—some Republican figures sought to cast his attempt to overturn the results as nothing more than a coping mechanism.
Trump was merely blowing off steam, people close to the president told me and other reporters.
“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” one asked, suggesting that in the end, his antics would amount to no more than a footnote in the annals of presidential history.
The January 6 insurrection a few weeks later would, of course, turn those predictions into punch lines.
Nearly six years on, they look worse still: The election denialism that inspired Trump’s MAGA loyalists to attack the Capitol has metastasized into an animating feature of Republican Party politics.
Trump himself remains at the forefront of this movement.
Since returning to office, he has insisted that American elections are “rigged” against the GOP, fired Democratic election officials, threatened to “take over” voting across the country, and issued executive orders that would tightly restrict the vote.
The president’s most far-reaching efforts have largely been blocked by the courts or Congress , at least so far.
As in 2020, Trump in fact has little legal authority to interfere with elections, and this has given comfort to many Americans.
But as November approaches, the most serious threats posed to free and fair elections no longer come from the White House itself.
Instead, they are local, where much of the power over elections actually resides, and they stem from the continuing absorption of Trump’s Big Lie into our political culture.
In statehouses and county offices, a cohort of election deniers has taken control of significant parts of the nation’s electoral infrastructure.
Some of its members have replaced the officials and legislators who rejected Trump’s push to corrupt the 2020 race.
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