In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

With a potential midterm wipeout just three months away, Republicans have been recycling past conspiracy theories to an epic extent, mining the greatest hits of a decade of paranoid plots both to please the president and to invoke memories of the “good old days.” 

From the Senate’s contentious hearings that saw Dr. Anthony Fauci grilled with lockdown-era conspiracy theories to President Trump’s continued evocation that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans are both replaying the past and actively rewriting it, trying to distract their voters from current crises and rally them around Trump’s brand one last time.

It’s impossible to look at the run-up to the 2026 midterms without examining the repackaging and reuse of the conspiracy theories that got us here. The midterms might be the last chance we see some of them used with any real efficacy, and nobody is missing their shot.

Trump himself has never stopped living in the frenetic period between the 2020 election and Joe Biden’s inauguration. Despite having actually conceded his defeat, both shortly after Jan.6 and in subsequent interviews, he has also continued to claim he did win the election. Trump’s relentless insistence that he won three times only to see one of them stolen (or “stollen” as he likes to misspell it) means that every single election they lose will immediately be written off as rigged by a vast conspiracy. This conspiracy, paradoxically, only seems to operate during elections when Trump is president and Republicans don’t do well.

Despite no evidence of any intentional, consequential rigging in any American election, Trump has already worked hard to cast doubt on the integrity of the upcoming midterms. Essentially, he’s calling them fraudulent before a single vote has been cast. In a July Oval Office address, Trump laid out a hopelessly complex international conspiracy theory about how the 2020 election was taken away from him — despite him being president in 2020 — and how it will happen again in 2026 without a series of harsh restrictions on mail-in voting, as well as additional voter ID regulations. His insistence that China interfered on behalf of Biden is massively overstated and repackaged from past allegations. 

Trump has even claimed, with absolutely no evidence, that the 2026 California primary was rigged against Republicans. The only proof Trump has even attempted to offer was that the state took a long time counting votes, and that insurgent LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt lost despite being popular on social media. 

Pratt’s loss was easy to forecast, and the rest of these accusations are recycled from 2020. The........

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