The Big Lie Part II
PLUS: A live discussion on Trump's Board of Peace with journalist Mark Leon Goldberg on February 2
In a January 14 interview with Reuters, U.S. President Donald Trump said, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election [in November].” His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, later tried to clarify that he was “simply joking” and that he meant that his administration was doing such a good job that it should keep “rolling.” However, the comment was one of a series of musings about cancelling future elections.
Trump has neither the legal authority nor practical ability to cancel elections. But he is doing everything in his power to undermine future ones. Exactly two weeks after the Reuters interview, FBI agents descended on the Fulton County, Georgia elections office, executing a criminal warrant in connection with Trump’s Justice Department’s efforts to find fraud in the 2020 election. They removed hundreds of boxes of ballots and voter information.
The reliably Democratic county containing most of Atlanta is ground zero for Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him: Georgia swung Democratic in 2020 for the first time since 1992, and on January 2, 2021, Trump called Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking that he “find” 11,780 more votes for Trump so he could be declared the winner of the state.
Adding to the abnormality of a raid conducted over five years after the alleged wrongdoing, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was at the elections office when the search was conducted. The presence of the coordinator of intelligence between 18 of the U.S. government’s spy agencies has no precedent or explanation. She has no jurisdiction over domestic law enforcement. However, her presence may have something to do with sowing wild conspiracy theories of foreign interference in U.S. elections: after news broke of the raid, Trump posted on Truth Social a series of discredited -- and bizarre -- claims about the 2020 election involving China, the CIA, FBI, and Italian satellites.
The raid isn’t just about putting the full weight of the U.S. government behind Trump’s grievances about the 2020 election -- it’s about the conduct of a free and fair election in 2026. Fulton County is a heavily Black, Democratic county in a swing state; in 2020, Trump pushed to invalidate votes in heavily Black cities like Milwaukee and Detroit, which are also in swing states. In 2026, Fulton County officials fear that the raid is part of an effort to wrest control of the county’s elections into the hands of the pro-Trump state elections board. Rob Pitts, Chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, told NPR: “There has to be something much bigger than just an FBI raid coming to Fulton County...I think this is about an effort to take over our state elections.”
Should Democrats win back control of Congress in 2026, Trump will likely claim that the result was bogus, and lean on local Republican officials to try to invalidate ballots on account of imagined fraud. In 2020, Republican officials like Secretary of State Raffensperger resisted this pressure; the 2026 election will likewise rest on the integrity of local officials -- but, this time, they will face the threat of politicized law enforcement from the federal government.
Trump has long spread conspiracy theories about millions of noncitizens voting and tainting election results. Hence, Democratic secretaries of state -- the state officials charged with organizing elections -- are worried that Trump will deploy federal immigration agents near polling places, especially in the aftermath of Trump’s deployment of ICE to Minneapolis, which has left two U.S. citizens dead. Deploying ICE would undoubtedly frighten U.S. citizens -- especially people of color and U.S. citizens with a migration background -- from voting.
Trump’s administration seems to be laying the groundwork for a new big lie about Republicans winning the 2026 elections if they do, in fact, lose them. However, elections are easier to manipulate if they are close. If Trump’s party loses by a lot, this effort will be seen as a brutal expression of power at odds with reality, and most Americans won’t like it, just as the killing of Alex Pretti by ICE agents has triggered a larger backlash.
If Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress, it would be a substantive check on Trump’s power, as he controls the executive branch. In addition, the Supreme Court has almost always sided with him and Congress is controlled by Republicans, who have shrugged as their power has been usurped by his administration. It makes sense, then, that he is doing everything to forestall this very real possibility by turning federal law enforcement into a personal tool of revenge, and in turn, eroding democracy.
I will be doing a live video on Monday, February 2 at 6pm CEST/12pm EST with international affairs journalist Mark Leon Goldberg, who writes the Global Dispatches Substack and hosts the Global Dispatches podcast. We will be discussing Trump’s efforts to create a Board of Peace and how it may be actually sparking new support for the United Nations. You can join the conversation on the Substack app for iOS/Android, and there will be a video afterwards.
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