It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

by Stuart Stevens

After he won on November 8, 2016, Donald Trump became the first winner of a presidential race to attack the legitimacy of his own victory. Weeks after the election, Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”11 It’s easy to dismiss this as another boastful lie from a pathological liar, like his claim on 9/11 that he now owned the tallest building in New York. But it’s much more. Trump doesn’t seem to realize that if millions of voters were actually illegal, it would invalidate his election, because it would be impossible to know for whom they cast votes. In Trump’s mind—and it sadly reflects the minds of many Republicans—the assumption is that any illegal voters would be Democratic voters with the associated assumption that they must be illegal Hispanic voters. As a way of trying to justify voter-suppression steps, the Republican Party has invested heavily in the myth of voter fraud. The fraud is trying to convince the public there is voter fraud of any significance. I’ve worked in campaigns since 1978, and I don’t know of a single race in which illegal voters were remotely a factor. Does some illegal voting happen? Sure, just as elephantiasis does occur in America. But should elephantiasis be the focus of the National Institutes of Health instead of cancer? Probably not.