Trump returns from Mar-a-Lago to the White House late on Sunday.Matt Kaminsky/Zuma
Just as day follows night and spring follows winter, one of the most inevitable occurrences in American life has begun again: Donald Trump is baselessly complaining about voter fraud following an election he did not win. After a strangely muted early reaction, a pledge to accept the results and work with Democrats, and then some furious posts on TruthSocial over the weekend, the president finally said explicitly that he doesn’t trust the election’s outcome. The fact that he would do so was never in doubt; the real question is whether other powerful people will follow suit.
“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest,” Trump wrote on his TruthSocial platform early Monday morning. “How could the Polls be so wrong??? Some early voting ‘dumps’ were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote. It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter! President DJT”
After so many years of collective exposure to the president’s psyche, it’s tempting to armchair psychologize and presume that this time his heart isn’t really in it. After all, he only authored one post, rather than the multi-part screed to which we’ve all become accustomed. And the posts written by other people that he shared over the weekend questioned results but stopped short of explicitly accusing anyone of fraud. “Honest question,” one read, above a somewhat illegible, blurry screenshot of a graph showing Texas voter turnout numbers, where the X-axis has been cut off. “Does anyone believe this at all? Still votes to count but… damn…”
Trump is strangely alone on this one.
In the leadup to the election, a great many MAGA aligned pundits and elected officials suggested that Democrats would steal the midterms, and indeed, that fraud was already in progress. In California, for instance, Bilal Essayli, a senior Trump-appointed prosecutor, claimed on X over the summer that there “is evidence of election fraud in California,” and that “more investigations are underway.” Earlier in the year, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon called for ICE to be at polling places, declaring, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.” Trump officials refused to rule out the idea of sending ICE or the military to polling places, even though it’s nakedly illegal.
In the end, however, ICE agents or the military didn’t show up, and no widespread allegations of voter fraud are currently being made. Trump is, in fact, strangely alone on this one; the White House X account hasn’t yet shared any fraud claims, although the account shared a post just before the election promising to investigate voting fraud. Trump’s vice president JD Vance also hasn’t engaged in the claim that fraud occurred, instead saying explicitly that the war in Iran was, as he put it, in a tweet, “the reason we lost.” No other prominent MAGA elected officials are yet making the claim either.
The lack of fraud accusations is so pronounced that Trump ally and mega-fan Laura Loomer complained over the weekend that other Republicans aren’t taking the issue seriously enough. “Have you noticed how so called ‘conservatives’ have been more focused on attacking President Trump’s inner circle as opposed to talking about the stories popping up in key states regarding suspected voter fraud?” she tweeted. “It’s one big opp. A lot of these people made deals with Democrats and you can tell they really couldn’t care less about what happens to our country so long as they get to livestream and cash in their super chats. The math isn’t making sense in Texas. That’s for sure.”
In fairness, there is one other prominent MAGA figure loudly making election fraud claims: MyPillow founder and established election-denialist Mike Lindell. This is especially bold of Lindell, given that he was sued for $1.3 billion in 2021 by Dominion Voting Systems over his claims that their machines were rigged; the parties agreed to a confidential settlement in 2026.
But even Lindell seemed to put a limit on the reach of his claims. “My cybersecurity team has identified what we believe are matching algorithmic patterns across multiple states, including Texas and Kansas,” Lindell tweeted, over a video of himself on LindellTV, the streaming platform he owns; the chyron as he spoke read, “ELECTION FRAUD IS OBVIOUS IN AMERICA.”
Lindell promised to release more information on Monday night and to show which elections, as he put it, “were taken.” It’s safe to say he’ll have at least one, very powerful, viewer.