With time running out in the 2024 presidential election and early voting underway across much of the country, then-Sen. JD Vance refused to answer questions about who was the rightful winner of the 2020 race. The Ohio Republican complained at the time that political journalists were “obsessed” with the election from four years earlier.
That same day, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer appeared on CNN and faced related questions from host Kaitlan Collins. “What are you doing talking about something that’s four years ago?” the Minnesota Republican asked, rather than answering the question directly. “This is something that you folks in the media want to focus on, on a regular basis.”
As it turns out, someone is “obsessed” with the 2020 race, and someone wants to focus on it “on a regular basis” — but it’s not news organizations.
Common sense might suggest that Donald Trump, now that he’s returned to power, might shift his attention to his presidential responsibilities, rather than relitigate his failed 2020 re-election bid, when he lost to Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes while failing to crack 47% of the popular vote. But on a nearly daily basis — online, during White House events, in interviews, etc. — the incumbent Republican president fixates on the 2020 race to a degree that can charitably be described as unhealthy.
Hardly a day goes by that Trump doesn’t say something about his ridiculous belief that the 2020 race was “rigged.” Indeed, just this week, the president floated a new, weird conspiracy theory — his latest idea apparently has something to do with Chinese license plates — adding fresh evidence to the idea that he just can’t move on from his defeat, even after having completed a successful comeback.
On Friday morning, the Republican appeared to take this pitiful crusade in a new direction. The Washington Post reported:
President Donald Trump is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the 2020 election, which he has baselessly claimed for years was rigged against him, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Nevertheless, six months into his second term as president, Trump is still relitigating the race he lost to Democrat Joe Biden — and is now calling for a special counsel to investigate his claims of fraud that have already been rejected by the courts dozens of times.
As part of his latest online tantrum, Trump peddled a variety of familiar and child-like assertions before claiming there’s “MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING” evidence of election “fraud” that he’s never been able to produce.
The Republican added, “A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. … Let the work begin!”
Look, there’s little value in me writing a few hundred words to explain that Trump lost fair square and the “overwhelming” evidence doesn’t exist. Let’s just stipulate that all fair-minded observers already know this.
Instead, I’m going to note that Trump should be careful what he wishes for.
A couple of years ago, the Washington Post reported on Trump’s political operation having hired the Berkeley Research Group to scrutinize the 2020 election. The purpose of the contract was obvious: The then-outgoing president and his team wanted the researchers to bolster Trump’s conspiracy theories about voter fraud and election irregularities.
That didn’t work out well: BRG couldn’t find any meaningful evidence. As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown joked, Trump “must have really hated that his campaign spent over $600,000 to be told he was wrong.” We later learned that the BRG wasn’t alone in tackling such an endeavor. Months later, the Post published a related report on Team Trump paying $750,000 to Simpatico Software Systems, which was also tasked with finding evidence of 2020 voter fraud. That didn’t go well, either: The company was unable to tell Republicans what they wanted to hear because the evidence simply didn’t exist. Ken Block, the owner of Simpatico Software Systems, later wrote an op-ed in USA Today, which was published with a striking headline: “Trump paid me to find voter fraud. Then he lied after I found 2020 election wasn’t stolen.” In his opinion piece, Block, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate, explained that his investigation failed to turn up meaningful evidence of voter fraud, adding that rank-and-file GOP voters have been fed “a steady diet of innuendo, misrepresentations and outright lies” on the issue. I mention this because Trump has already initiated investigations into his 2020 defeat. These investigators were motivated to tell their client exactly what he wanted to hear, but they simply couldn’t provide Trump with proof that didn’t exist. The same is true of state-based audits, which confirmed that the actual election results from that race were accurate. Now, the president is effectively saying that yet another investigation is necessary, since the original investigations, including the ones he paid for, were apparently too reality-based for him. What’s more, the Justice Department is in the hands of shameless Trump loyalists who might very well find some far-right partisan willing to take on the duties of a special counsel. But happens when this investigation concludes the same thing as all of the other investigations? Does he seek another? Followed by another?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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