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DENIAL DENIAL - Independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont warned Tuesday that former President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee, is laying the groundwork for another round of election denial if he loses to Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
Taking aim at Trump's false claim that a photo showing thousands of people waiting to greet Harris and her Democratic running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, at a Michigan airport is a fake generated by artificial intelligence, Sanders said in a statement that "Donald Trump may be crazy, but he's not stupid."
"When he claims that 'nobody' showed up at a 10,000-person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was livestreamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness," the senator continued.
"Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses," Sanders argued. "If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are 'fake' and 'fraudulent.'"
"This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about," he added. "This is why we must do everything we can to see that Trump is defeated."
Trump infamously tried to overturn the results of his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden, an effort that culminated in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection and resulted in a historic second impeachment by the then-Democrat-controlled House of Representatives and a slew of federal and state felony charges in two separate election interference cases.
As his polling lead evaporates amid surging liberal enthusiasm over the Harris-Walz ticket, Trump has reverted to his oft-repeated 2020 claim that if he loses, it will be due to "cheating."
Trump, his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), and many Republican officials have recently ramped up attacks on undocumented immigrants. Although the myth of the "illegal immigrant voters" has been widely debunked—including by right-wing groups—Republicans and others including billionaire businessman Elon Musk, who interviewed Trump on his social media platform X Monday evening, have been amplifying false claims about undocumented voters affecting the outcome of the election.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)—who led the legal fight to overturn the 2020 election results—also recently accused undocumented immigrants of attempting to "disrupt our elections."
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.)—one of just eight senators who refused to certify Biden's 2020 Electoral College victory—said in July: "I traveled to the future to an imaginary world where actually Joe Biden got reelected... In my dream I met the ghost of Biden's future... It was easy for Democrats to rig the elections; they simply allowed all the noncitizens to vote."
On Monday, the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) published a report revealing that 35 county officials around the country who were involved in efforts to subvert the 2020 election are still in positions to do so again.
"I think there's almost no question that this is going to happen," CREW president Noah Bookbinder said of another attempt to overturn the election. "And it seems to be happening in a way this year that is more systematic than it has been in the past. So that's deeply, deeply concerning."
(Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams where this article was first published.)
