Marc Elias: Donald Trump’s Plan Is to Make it Harder for People to Vote and Easier for Him to Cheat

EXCERPT:

ELIAS: "No, look, I think you’re exactly right. I mean, you know, what we’ve seen is that Donald Trump has a progression that he goes through. He stakes out an unreasonable position. He raises the rhetoric around it. When that doesn’t do what he wants it to do, he goes to court. When the courts shut him down, he loses in court, then he escalates to to further rhetoric and inspires his supporters to use extralegal methods. Now,if what I just described sounds like what happened in 2020, it is, right. Donald Trump attacked mail-in voting before the election. He attacked the election results. Afterwards, he went to court. When that didn’t work, he then incited a violent insurrection. But, you know, you could look at what he did with immigration through the same lens. He demonized migrants. He increased the rhetoric. Then there were court cases about, for example, him trying to send people out of the country to foreign gulags. And when that failed, you saw U.S. citizens being killed in the streets, in places like Minneapolis. And so, like, I very much worry that this November, as we head towards these elections, Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan B that is like, 'Okay, lower, you know, costs, reach to the center.' He doesn’t have that. He’s got only one plan. And that is, as I said, it is to make it harder for people to vote and easier for him to cheat. And what happens is because it’s really hard for him to pull that off, because the courts have not gone along with him in the past. When that fails, Symone, what you are left with is him escalating the rhetoric. And then we’ve seen what happens."