Near the very end of this week’s vice presidential debate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz asked Ohio Sen. JD Vance a question, the relevance of which lingered long after the event. “Did he [Donald Trump] lose the 2020 election?” the Democratic nominee asked.

His GOP rival refused to answer — the senator would only say that he’s “focused on the future” — and the Harris campaign quickly turned Vance’s dodge into a campaign ad.

A day later, the Republican vice presidential nominee was asked the same question, which he dodged again, while accusing news organizations of being “obsessed” with the election from four years ago. That same evening, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer appeared on CNN and asked Kaitlan Collins, “What are you doing talking about something that’s four years ago?” The Minnesota congressman added, in reference to the 2020 race, “This is something that you folks, in the media, want to focus on, on a regular basis.”

It was against this backdrop that Trump, a day later, made his running mate and congressional ally appear rather foolish. NBC News reported:

Trump said toward the top of his remarks at a rally in Saginaw, Michigan, that if he thought he lost the 2020 presidential election, he wouldn’t be running again.

“We won. We won,” the former president declared despite reality. “We did win. It was a rigged election. It was a rigged election.”

It’s not exactly a secret that Republican officials have pleaded with Trump, publicly and privately, to stop pushing his ridiculous conspiracy theories about his 2020 defeat — what many have labeled the former president’s “big lie” — in large part because it’s a losing message that much of the electorate doesn’t want to hear.

But Trump simply can’t help himself. Despite Vance and other leading GOP voices occasionally telling the public that the party and its ticket are “focused on the future,” Trump has a habit of fixating on the past.

Indeed, it’s a staple of the Republican nominee’s message. A HuffPost report noted, even before Vance dodged the 2020-related question: “Trump had already brought up the stolen election repeatedly in the past week ― he brings up 2020, unprompted, pretty much every time he speaks in public, though he doesn’t always explicitly say it was ‘rigged.’”

That was, however, the word he used at his latest event in Michigan. It was also the word he used by way of his social media platform on Wednesday night, after special counsel Jack Smith’s brutal court filing was unsealed. “I didn’t rig the 2020 Election, they did!” the former president wrote, pointing to a version of reality with no resemblance to our own.

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The problem is not just that Trump is lying. What’s more, the fact that the Republican presidential nominee and vice presidential nominee are offering contradictory messages about the 2020 race is amazing, but it’s not the most important detail.

Rather, what ultimately matters most is the fact that Trump, who laid the groundwork to reject the results of his re-election bid long before Election Day 2020, is doing the same thing again.

As we’ve discussed, the former president refuses to say whether he’ll accept the results of this year’s contest. On a routine basis, he also falsely tells the public that his foes are cheaters and election results are suspect — unless he says otherwise.

As NBC News reported, Trump has also begun referring to just about everything as “election interference,” evidence be damned, as part of a multifaceted effort to pre-emptively delegitimize the 2024 race, just in case he loses.

His efforts four years ago were a deliberate assault on democracy. As he reads from the same script, the scam has not improved with age.

If Democrats are fortunate, Trump won’t change course at all and the final 32 days of the election cycle will feature the GOP candidate, at one event after another, peddling the same whiny lie that most Americans tired of quite a while ago.