Early voting is under way in several states and mail ballots are already arriving in others for America's latest too-close-to-call presidential election.
I don't know if Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump will prevail after the polls close. But I can predict with unfortunate certainty how Trump will behave before and after Election Day because we've all seen it before. And that particular old dog isn't learning any new tricks.
Modern-day election denialism, with Trump as its most duplicitous practitioner, can be defined by three distinct phases.
First, unfounded claims are made about election integrity long before the ballots are printed. Trump loves to harp about mail ballots, even as the Republican National Committee urges voters to use them. Republicans this year have also leaned hard into unsubstantiated claims about widespread voting by noncitizens.
In the second phase – which we're in now – election deniers desperately try to link actual ballots being cast to their disinformation about voter fraud. Republicans, valuing fealty to election denialism over service for country, are now trying to disenfranchise the votes cast by military members deployed overseas.
The final phase, which starts when the polls close on Election Day, is a simple two-pronged plan – prematurely declare victory while claiming, without evidence, that ballots are being tallied in a dishonest manner. That's what Trump did in the early morning hours of the Wednesday after Election Day in 2020.
Trump never admitted that lie. Why wouldn't he try it again if he fears he is again losing the election?
Six Republican members of the U.S. House from........