Trump's fraud campaign is incompetent, hilarious, and terrifying

It seems all but certain that President Trump has lost the election. He is far behind in the national popular vote, and behind in more than enough swing states to clinch the election for Joe Biden. Most of the outstanding votes in those states, moreover, appear to be from heavily Democratic regions.

The Trump forces are not taking this lying down. Since late on Election Day, there has been a concerted effort to essentially steal the election. As I predicted, simply by listening to what Trump and his allies were loudly saying, conservative celebrities have fabricated ridiculous accusations of voter fraud, conservative activists have attempted to barge their way into counting stations to disrupt the tabulation process, and Trump himself heavily implied to reporters that multiple states had been stolen. "We also had margins of 300,000 in Michigan … we won the state, and Wisconsin we did likewise," he said falsely on Thursday. "We will not allow the corruption to steal such an important election."

Now, this effort has been comically disorganized. Because he did not establish an early lead in enough states, the Trump campaign has been forced to simultaneously argue for a recount in some states, and for the vote-counting to be halted in others. There appeared to be little plan aside from tweeting and going on TV to whine to actually interfere with the vote-counting process. A bunch of cranks, including Pizzagate conspiracy theorists Mike Cernovich and Jack Posoboiec, and conservative youth activist Charlie Kirk, are organizing rallies that so far appear to be about self-promotion. Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and Rudy Giuliani are filing lawsuits that don't even make sense on their own terms. Even conservative judges and most Republican legislators appear to be dismissing the entire thing out of hand.

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That said, this does not bode well at all. The president of the United States and much of the conservative media apparatus instantly got themselves on board with a preposterous story about a stolen election. If Trump weren't so incompetent, or if the election were closer, it's easy to imagine a much more successful effort — which is basically what happened in 2000, when a conservative Supreme Court installed George W. Bush by judicial fiat. Just because an election theft failed from incompetence doesn't mean a future one won't succeed.