Former President Donald Trump is trying to convey a message to major Republican donors: Indictment or no, I’m still the best horse in this race. In making that case before Republican National Committee donors on Saturday, he opted to ditch his preferred topic — the number of ways he’s been wronged over the years — to focus on what a second term would bring.
A willingness to move on from 2020 is definitely what donors want to hear right now.
This newfound desire to look toward the future included a pitch to return him to office “through electoral strategies he once decried, like robust mail-in voting and ballot harvesting,” according to Politico, which obtained a copy of his remarks. At first it looked like a potential major shift in strategy with implications for races up and down the ballot next year. But any hope for the GOP to regain lost ground on that front doesn’t stand a chance against Trump’s worst instincts.
A willingness to move on from 2020 is definitely what donors want to hear right now. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been seen as Trump’s biggest competition for the Republican nomination, has been slipping as of late among the party’s patricians, likely due at least in part to his ongoing play for the far-right populist wing of the base. Ironically, given the race to the bottom between the two front-runners, billionaire Thomas Peterffy recently told the Financial Times that because of DeSantis’ “stance on abortion and book banning . . . myself, and a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry.”
So when I first saw the Politico story Sunday night, I wondered how long this supposedly new focus could possibly last. By Monday morning, I had my answer: about 48 hours, at most. In a 2 a.m. post on his Truth Social account, Trump lambasted Fox News for not admitting “IF FOX WOULD FINALLY ADMIT THAT THERE WAS LARGE SCALE CHEATING & IRREGULARITIES IN THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION,” adding that “THERE IS SOOO MUCH PROOF, LIKE MASS BALLOT STUFFING CAUGHT ON GOVERNMENT CAMERAS.”
The problem here is that Trump can’t let go of grievances even when it benefits him. His obsession with crowd sizes is the most laughable version of this habit, but it’s been a clear throughline for his entire time in politics. His refusal to let go of the Russia probe led to his first impeachment; his steadfast conviction that he should be able to keep government documents might lead to another criminal indictment. And, of course, his inability to admit his loss in 2020 helped spark the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
With that track record, it’s doubtful that he’ll be able to stick to the script on mail-in voting, no matter how much his campaign wants him to do so. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that his team is “studying state laws governing absentee and mail-in voting as well as ballot collection.” That new strategy was reflected in a fundraising email, sent out under Trump’s name declaring that the “path forward is to MASTER the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots in every state we can,” the WSJ reported.
Telling folks what they want to hear so they’ll open up their wallets is exactly what Trump was doing in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Before Trump launched his assault on mail-in voting, it was correctly seen as a tactic where neither party held any kind of huge advantage. That changed when Democratic-led states in particular began expanding access to mail-in and early voting during the height of the Covid pandemic. That led Trump to falsely insist that mail ballots are rife with fraud, a claim that is still plaguing Republican candidates to this day despite ample proof that neither party has benefited massively from the increase in the years since.
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel last year gave a full-throated endorsement of mail-in balloting during a Fox News interview. But it’s an effort that has been hamstrung by the legacy of Trump’s lies. It will be hard for them to roll that back, even if it’s under the framing of embracing a tactic that Democrats supposedly used to cheat. That’s especially true while his lies about 2020 are still shaping the way the RNC talks about “election integrity.”
So, while it’s a big deal that Trump was willing to change his tune on mail-in voting, it came as he was reading a speech written by his campaign to convince donors to give him money. And telling folks what they want to hear so they’ll open up their wallets is exactly what Trump was doing in the aftermath of the 2020 election — and one of the many things for which he’s reportedly currently being investigated.
At this point it feels more like a new round of grifting than any real shift in how Trump views the practice or its role in his loss to Joe Biden.
