The Trump administration’s “unprecedented” escalation in its campaign to exert more control over the midterms is part of a grander scheme to create a contingency plan should Republicans suffer a “devastating” election loss, legal expert Joyce Vance theorized Saturday.
“That’s what we need to be on guard for here,” Vance wrote in an analysis published Saturday night on her Substack. “Trump is already laying the groundwork to claim another election was stolen, rather than accept a result he doesn’t like.”
This week, the Justice Department demanded that California not send ballots to a list of individuals it suspected were noncitizens, along with several other demands. The DOJ gave California officials 48 hours to comply under threat of legal action, which the agency followed up on Thursday.
However, as flagged by Vance, who previously served as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, it seemed “pretty obvious” that the Trump administration’s plan was doomed to fail given the proximity to the midterms and legal precedents against making sweeping election changes.
That the plan was doomed to fail, however, may be the point, Vance theorized.
“It seems far more likely that what’s happening here is that the administration is setting up a narrative for after the election about how it was stolen,” Vance wrote.
“What if the whole goal here is to have the courts slap down the case, so that Trump can argue, after a potentially devastating loss for Republicans at the polls, that it happened because the courts refused to stop noncitizens from voting even though he begged them to?”
Vance continued: “It wouldn’t be true, but when has that ever stopped this president? That kind of pernicious narrative fits with the guy who perpetrated January 6 and who has never felt compelled to stick to the confines of the truth when talking about election outcomes.”