After 4 Years Of Claiming US Elections Are ‘Most Secure Ever,’ Leftists Again Accuse Trump Of Stealing Them
In just their latest bizarre twist of logic, leftists are again accusing President Donald Trump of planning to steal an election — even though for the last four years, they insisted this was impossible.
On Friday, Paul Rosenzweig asserted in an article for The Atlantic that “Trump Is Already Undermining The Next Election.” He claimed Trump’s executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote was “nothing less than an attempt to disenfranchise his opponents and forestall electoral defeat.” In reality, the measure would simply prevent noncitizens from voting and reinforce other vulnerable areas of elections, for example, by requiring paper ballots. Still, he apparently thinks Trump will rig the next election.
Rosenzweig is not alone. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told The New Yorker last month that he thinks Trump is turning America “from a democracy to an autocracy,” and that “the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026.” These concerns come as Democrats’ favorability is plummeting.
Even before Trump’s landslide victory in November, legacy media were planting seeds that he might “steal” the race. MSNBC said in October that then-Vice President Kamala Harris was “prepared if Trump tries to steal the election,” while NBC said Trump could “declare a premature election win.” Vox even speculated that Trump would use the Supreme Court to “steal the election.” And just days before the election, The Rolling Stone published an article on “How Republicans Could Help Steal The Election From Harris.”
After Trump won, many Democrats began wondering how their immensely popular candidate could have lost. After all, she spent millions on celebrity endorsements, and rapper Lizzo promised that if Harris won, the “whole country will be like Detroit.” What could have gone wrong?
Leftist writer Greg Palast claimed Trump used “Jim Crow tricks” to cheat Harris out of more than 3.5 million votes. Various other Democrats online began crafting stories about how Trump might have cheated Harris out of the election. It spiraled so far out of control that even NBC published a story stating, “Election denialism emerges on the left after Trump’s win.”
This was a remarkable turn from the last four years, when leftist outlets constantly claimed rigging the election was impossible. When conservatives expressed concerns about things like noncitizen voting, or government censorship, or Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg giving millions to election administrators through leftist nonprofits to boost Democrat turnout, leftists smeared them as “election deniers.”
To rewind the clock even further, Democrats were the real “election deniers” when Trump first won office in 2016. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign hatched a plot to paint Trump as a “Russian asset,” hiring the firm Fusion GPS to fabricate a dossier peddled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. It turned out that Steele’s sources lied extensively. Meanwhile, Clinton called Trump an “illegitimate president,” and Harris — then a senator — claimed that “Russia interfere[d] in the election of the president of the United States.”
The amount of back-and-forth from Democrats on elections is enough to cause whiplash. When they lost in 2016, they denied the results. When then-candidate Joe Biden won in 2020, they claimed American elections were bulletproof, and anyone claiming otherwise must be an evil “election denier.” But after November’s election, which Trump won with both the Electoral College and popular vote, they again claimed he stole the election. Now, leftists are already planting seeds that Trump is planning to steal another.
This all goes to show that Democrats are not really concerned about election integrity — they are only concerned when they lose.
Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He is a spring 2025 fellow of The College Fix. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
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