In 2020, we didn’t know better.
While thousands nationwide rejoiced in spontaneous celebrations after Joe Biden officially became the president-elect four days after Election Day, Donald Trump posted lies on social media about the legitimacy of the election he’d lost.
No one expected Trump to be gracious. His petty refusal to concede was a way to dodge a public acknowledgement of the label that he fears the most — loser. All that mattered to many was that Trump had been vanquished by more than 81 million voters.
Then triumph turned to acrimony. The weeks after the election were easily the most chaotic since the 2000 presidential campaign, when Americans tried to understand the difference between hanging and dimpled chads.
Without evidence, Trump spewed lies that widespread fraud sabotaged his reelection. He filed dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits aimed at overturning the results. He pressured Republican state election officials to give him the votes that voters had cast against him.
When every legal means was exhausted, Trump incited a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol to disrupt the election’s certification. Now, with the midterm elections less than a week away and Republicans expected to lose at least the House, Trump is ramping up yet another antidemocratic assault on free and fair elections.
On Monday, Trump announced his latest ploy — a $1 million reward for tips about voter fraud that lead to an arrest and conviction. Even though such cases are very rare, the president knows that a seven-figure incentive is more than enough for some people to make false claims that could sow confusion or perhaps even delay vote counts.
The Department of Justice is sending 1,000 election observers to polling spots in all 50 states on Election Day. Trump is not the first president to do so, but it’s the scale that Trump is deploying that makes this effort seem like an intimidation tactic plucked from the Jim Crow era.
That could be why early voting, including mail-in ballots, is running ahead of the same period leading up to the midterms in 2018 and 2022. As of Oct. 23, about 21 million people had already voted.
Even Trump, who has spent years falsely denigrating mail-in voting as “inherently corrupt,” has encouraged his supporters to mail-in their ballots early — as he has often done.
For much of his presidency, Trump has been fixated on making voting as difficult as possible. In a blatant act of voter suppression, Trump pushed Republican-led state legislatures to redraw their congressional districts. His aim was clear: to dilute, in particular, Black voting power, and help House Republicans win more seats.
In April, the president got a major assist from the conservative-led Supreme Court, which gutted what little remained of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
But even if voters repudiate Trump and policies that have inflicted economic hardship, flooded communities with marauding federal immigration agents, and fomented discontent in a nation that is careening in the wrong direction, the president will still lie about the results if — and likely when — they do not yield the outcome that he wants.
Another antidemocratic assault from another Trump administration seems inevitable, but with a marked difference — this time he’s surrounded himself with true believers. As Trump’s Big Lie metastasized in 2020, several members of Trump’s Cabinet, including William Barr, his attorney general, scurried for the exits.
If his combative appearances on Sunday’s news shows were any indication, Attorney General Todd Blanche seems primed to back any postelection lie that Trump spreads. That includes a DOJ lawsuit, ordered by Trump, to block Alaska state officials from certifying its election results if incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan loses.
That’s because he’s running against not only Democrat Mary Peltola but also Dan J. Sullivan, who switched his affiliation from Republican to “undeclared.” The Trump administration thinks voters will get confused, vote for the wrong Sullivan, and cost them a Senate seat.
This week, a federal appeals court slapped down the Trump administration’s attempt to ban California from counting the ballots of 20,000 registered voters that the DOJ claims are noncitizens.
The last two years of Trump’s presidency will bring a blizzard of lawsuits, outrageous lies, racism, threats to public officials, and levels of vengeance that will likely surpass even the deep harms that this man has already unleashed.
Six years on, Trump’s Big Lie clings to these midterms. Its stench is even more stifling and will remain so long after the last votes are counted. These may well be the most disputed elections in this nation’s history because Trump — again — perceives fair elections not as the bedrock of American democracy but as something to be undermined and circumvented for his own benefit.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.