'Useful boogeyman': N.Y. Times columnist warns Stop the Steal won't end with Trump

The threat to democracy will continue even if former President Donald Trump loses the election, wrote Jamelle Bouie for The New York Times on Friday — because he is already preparing to attack the democratic process all over again.

"For Trump, a man who seems to live in the eternal present, 'stop the steal' never actually ended," wrote Bouie. "He maintains, as he did on Nov. 3, 2020, that he won the presidential election that put Joe Biden in the White House. Last month, he told an audience in Wisconsin, 'We won this state by a lot.'" (He lost it by 20,682 votes.)

"He told Time magazine, in a recent interview, that he 'wouldn’t feel good' about hiring anyone who believed that Biden was the legitimate winner of the last presidential election. Asked if he would accept the results of the 2024 election, Trump said that he would, 'if everything’s honest.'"

Trump admittedly doesn't have the Justice Department and the presidency behind him for such a scheme this time — but he has Republican lawmakers on his side, with many of his vice presidential hopefuls refusing to commit to accepting election results either.

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The idea of "illegal voting" being responsible for turning elections against Trump, wrote Bouie, was, "A useful boogeyman for a president-elect who ran on the fantasy that the United States had been besieged by illegal immigrants."

"It remains a useful boogeyman as the former president revs up his supporters with spittle-flecked attacks on immigrants, who he says are 'poisoning the blood of our country.' If one set of Trump allies is spreading the notion of an unfair election, another set is building out what that might mean by placing the specter of illegal voting by migrants and undocumented immigrants at the center of their rhetorical agenda."

Indeed, Bouie added, this didn't even start with Trump. As Mitt Romney's "47 percent" remarks suggested as far back as 2012, Republicans have long believed that majorities against them are "not quite right — not quite real, not quite American."

"We should not expect a Biden victory, if it comes, to end the threat to American democracy," concluded Bouie. "With or without Trump, a Republican Party that cannot share this country with its political opponents is a Republican Party that will always look for one way or another to stop the steal."