If you go to Republican National Committee headquarters, one thing you’ll notice, Lara Trump explained onstage Friday night, “is that the bulk of the staff — the bodies that are actually in the R.N.C. building — are dedicated to one cause: election integrity.”
She was sitting between her husband, Eric, and Jason Simmons, who is the new North Carolina G.O.P. chair, on three stools before a few hundred delegates at tables decorated with red and white roses, at the state’s party convention in Greensboro, N.C. Some were wearing red, white and blue stickers with a message about cleaning up the voter rolls. One statewide candidate promised to “audit” the voting machinery and technology. “Election integrity,” in Donald Trump’s telling, tends to be about the past; party co-chairs like Ms. Trump usually talk about the present.
Soon after, Eric called his father, put him on speaker, and piped his voice right into the microphone to a thrilled crowd. The three sat onstage, motionless, as Mr. Trump talked about the border, then eventually, came to North Carolina. He won the state in 2016, then again in 2020. North Carolina, Mr. Trump said, “was with us, and it was with us right from the beginning, and it stayed that way — whereas Pennsylvania, Georgia, a lot of them were with us, then all of the sudden …”
North Carolina, the ostensible battleground state that Mr. Trump won in 2020, poses a problem to Mr. Trump’s theory that the election was stolen from him. Theoretically, that Mr. Trump won while a Democrat won the governorship offers the best proof of all that the election was not stolen. But perhaps because to concede his own success in one place would render his failure elsewhere unbearable, Mr. Trump must instead believe that fraud took place there as well, and that Michael Whatley defeated it.
Earlier this year, when Mr. Trump backed Mr. Whatley, then North Carolina Republican chair, to become R.N.C. chair, sources told The Times that the “overwhelming reason” is that he is “a stop the steal guy.” Last month, at a rally near Allentown, Pa., on a brisk night, Mr. Trump introduced Mr. Whatley: “He’s going to stop voter theft. He’s going to stop them stealing the vote; he’s going to stop stop the steal.”
Mr. Trump’s obsession with the 2020 election and focus on “election integrity” doesn’t just work in a backward-looking way “Election integrity” is shaping the future of what a second Trump term would look like in terms of his staff. A stated belief in election fraud claims can sometimes make or break someone’s standing in the party.
When things looked like they might get dicey for Mike Johnson’s House speakership, he flew to Palm Beach, stood next to Mr. Trump and said that we had to stop undocumented immigrants from voting, which is already illegal in federal elections. When politicians trying to secure the vice-presidential nomination go on TV, they have to avoid saying anything that might contradict how Mr. Trump would approach past or future elections. When former Trump staffers form an outside group to vet future staff for a Trump administration, part of their efforts include funding the legal defenses of people like John Eastman.
As Jonathan Chait observed earlier this year, the stolen election claim has proven invaluable “as a tool for exposing secret skeptics.” This is the use of “election integrity” as a cudgel to demand public loyalty to Mr. Trump. The kind demonstrated in the final days of Mr. Trump’s White House by people like John McEntee, the aide who in November 2020 “threaten[ed] to oust” Trump staffers looking for other jobs after the election had been called, according to The Washington Post. Aides get bounced, in some people’s telling, because they once expressed doubts about the election being stolen, while one of the people indicted in Arizona in connection with efforts to subvert the 2020 election is now the lead lawyer on “election integrity” at the R.N.C.
Election integrity can work the other way, too: as a path to influence with Mr. Trump. A lot of issues and tactics can become about “election integrity;” a lot of people who care about “election integrity” can care about other ambitions .
In the days after the 2020 election, Mr. Whatley talked about the turnout operation Republicans had built in North Carolina. “That ground game was the difference in all of these races,” he told a local radio host that month, detailing the down-ballot achievements. “We won across the board, really, with that 100,000, 150,000-vote margin really because of our ground game.” Asked about Mr. Trump’s fraud claims, he gestured at fraud in other states, but said his state was well run. As The Times reported earlier this year, Mr. Whatley resisted efforts to push for an audit of the state’s election results.
By the next year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, at an election integrity panel on “successful states,” Mr. Whatley was explaining that, “When I got elected in June 2019, the first thing I did that month is set up a goal of getting those 500 attorneys, and everybody looked at me like, ‘What? Why are you doing this?’ We need to be lawyered up.”
When Mr. Whatley addressed the state convention in Greensboro last week, he sounded like a party chair from any decade, like the ground game guy. “You’ve got to get your people to the polls and you have to persuade the unaffiliated, you gotta persuade the independents, you gotta persuade the undecided voters,” Mr. Whatley said.
He has talked about his plan to field 100,000 volunteer poll watchers and attorneys. Ms. Trump talked about that plan too, and she also sounded more like a party chair from an earlier era, like she was trying to shoehorn traditional ways of winning elections (early voting, big time fund-raising) into the great struggle for election integrity.
“We have to fight fire with dynamite,” Ms. Trump said of matching legal Democratic efforts to collect ballots. She talked, at length, about the importance of voting early and using the additional time to help turn out other voters. Much of what Ms. Trump and Mr. Whatley talked about seemed, actually, about fighting the prospect of fraud by getting Republican voters to become comfortable again with early voting — a return to normal against the tide of Mr. Trump’s inability to accept his own defeat.
“I think it’s funny because someone finally told my father in law,” Ms. Trump said at one point of early voting. “They said, ‘Mr. President, people love you so much, they want to go vote for you as soon as they possibly can; tell them to go vote for you,’ and he was like, ‘Absolutely, they should go vote for me.’”
In Pennsylvania last month, I listened to Donald Trump lament that we have an “election period” now, rather than a simple Election Day, because “some of these things” go for 48 days. “What the hell are they doing for 48 days?” he said. “You know what they’re doing: They’re stealing the vote.”
And what’s the price of “election integrity” as both cudgel and opportunity? There are the people who really believe the fraud claims in their hearts and the people who don’t but know how to make it sound like they do, and both seem likely to be a part of the Trump future. If you believe the election really was taken from Mr. Trump, it would be a crisis of American life, and that seems to have pushed the most committed Republicans further into an apocalyptic-tinged vision of America.
If you don’t believe that the election was taken from him, but you’re willing to not just say so but to act on it, all the influence in the world in the form of the U.S. president might one day be available to you — for anything from responsible aims to the worst ones.
And for everyone else, there are more people than ever who just don’t trust elections, people who think something malicious might happen behind closed doors, people who can’t trust anything.
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