Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

Grandpa Trump went on Fox and Friends yesterday morning to make a very strange appeal: He told Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade and the rest of the Brain Dead Heads, “My instruction is, we don’t need the votes. We have so many votes…” before breaking into a Breakfast Braggadocio about his support in Florida. “I drove to another location yesterday, and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it, every single house, there’s not a house that we passed that doesn’t…”

Okay, let’s forget for a moment that counting lawn signs in the month of July is hardly a measure of support in a campaign that ends in November. But what the hell was he talking about when he said, “we don’t need the votes?” One day after the debate in June, he went to Virginia and told a rally, “We don’t need votes, we need protection of the votes once they’re cast.”

It was a theme he had brought up at the far-right “Faith and Freedom” conference in Washington D.C. the week before the debate. “I tell my people, we don’t need any votes. We’ve got all the votes we need. I don’t need votes. All I want to do is make sure that we guard our votes. It’s guard. We stop the steal, okay?”

The week before, at a convention warm-up put on in Detroit by Turning Point U.S.A, the far-right “youth” organization run by Charlie Kirk, the Granddad with a Sunrise on His Head returned to the same call-out: “We don’t need votes. We got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote. We need to guard the vote. We need to stop the steal. We don’t need votes. We have to stop—focus, don’t worry about votes. We’ve got all the votes. I was in Florida yesterday—every house has a Trump sign. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. We have to guard the vote.”

Where is this coming from? Sure, with the lawn-sign count, he’s bragging about his support, but tagging onto that an invitation to his supporters not to turn out on election day? What could he be thinking?

He repeatedly drops a hint with the “stop the steal” refrain about “guarding” the vote. In other remarks, he has bragged about how many lawyers his campaign has signed up to “guard” not just polling places, but “watch every voter.” That sounds like plans for voter intimidation, but there could be more at work here. 

In 2020, Trump’s attempt to overturn the election results was a cobbled-together affair, with 60 lawsuits filed so sloppily that several were thrown out of court because they were filed improperly, and others were dismissed because supporting evidence of “fraud” consisted only of affidavits signed by random people alleging fantastic scenarios such as watching a voting machine switch their vote from Trump to Biden. 

It’s possible that Trump is spending as much time and money on a post-election plan to overthrow the election as he is spending on actually campaigning. He is doubtlessly lining up teams of lawyers in battleground states to file pre-prepared lawsuits challenging election results in each state. But as Trump learned the last time, lawsuits must be litigated before judges who tend to hew to rules of evidence that might disfavor allegations of fraud where none exist.

A far more dangerous scenario is the Trump campaign meeting secretly with legislators to prepare the ground to challenge electors in battleground states that Harris wins. This strategy would be directed at a full-on challenge on the next Jan. 6 when both houses of Congress meet to certify electoral votes and determine the winner of the presidential election. The aim would be to create enough chaos and doubt that the election would not be certified and would be turned over to the House of Representatives for a vote on the winner. Rules in such a vote would award votes by states according to the size of their delegations in the House, which would of course favor Republicans over Democrats and flip the election results.

If I were running the Harris campaign, I would have campaign officials in each of the battleground states watching closely for so-called “retreats” by Republican members of the state houses when meetings with Trump campaign officials might take place. The “retreats” would be private, not covered by state “sunshine” laws mandating meetings in public, because the business on the agenda would be Republican Party business, not state legislative matters.

Whatever Trump has in mind cannot be good, when he is telling rallies packed with MAGA voters that they don’t have to worry about voting, because he already “has the votes.”

There is something exceedingly smelly going on here, and as usual, it’s being done right out there in full view. The scent of voter intimidation is probably there to divert attention from what’s going on behind the scenes where the real stink is.