Trump’s Just Calling Every Election Fraudulent at This Point

and several billion dollars short, but still...

For President Trump, any Democratic election victory is suspicious on its face.

No shit, Sherlocks. What was your 2,993rd clue?

Even, apparently, in one of the most liberal cities in America.

“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Monday. “3rd World Nation.” On election night last Tuesday, Mr. Pratt—the reality-television personality and Trump-endorsed Republican—led the progressive city councilwoman Nithya Raman for second place to advance to November’s mayoral runoff, behind the incumbent, Mayor Karen Bass, who is also a Democrat. But as election officials spent the following week counting late-arriving mail ballots, which were disproportionately from Democrats, Ms. Raman edged ahead of Mr. Pratt. On Monday evening, The Associated Press said that she had indeed prevailed.

Such fleeting Republican leads are common enough to have a name—the “red mirage”—yet Mr. Trump, as he did in his own 2020 loss, cast the slow count as proof of theft. By baselessly framing Ms. Raman’s rise as a Democratic scam, Mr. Trump extended his long-running project to erode public faith in elections—and gave an unusually clear preview of how he could greet any disappointing results for his party in November, when control of Congress is at stake.

If you were waiting for the elite political media to write something plain about the ongoing catastrophe, you have finally crawled to the oasis.

What is striking so far is how little of this has survived contact with reality. Voting legislation he has championed, the SAVE Act, cleared the House but stalled in the Senate, where Republicans lack the votes to break a Democratic filibuster. Among other things, the bill would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and would compel states to share voter rolls with the federal government.

An executive order he signed in March directing the Department of Homeland Security to assemble a federal list of eligible voters and barring the Postal Service from delivering mail ballots to anyone left off it was condemned by election experts as illegal and drew multiple lawsuits.

Still, even if Mr. Trump fails to change election laws or processes, he can sow substantial chaos simply by trying to convince voters that the results were fraudulent.

More than five years after his supporters, fueled by lies about a stolen election, stormed the Capitol to stop the transfer of power, Mr. Trump has tried to recast January 6, 2021, as a day of “peace,” claiming his supporters were led astray by FBI officers in a false-flag operation. He has produced no credible evidence, yet he has pardoned rioters who breached the Capitol and has entertained paying restitution to some of them, over the objections of even some in his own party.

You’ll forgive some of us a few moments of rueful gloating that the scales have finally fallen from certain eyes.

During his losing 2020 campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly made baseless claims that mail-in voting was rife with fraud. In that election, Democrats, many of whom were strictly adhering to pandemic protocols, were much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, who tended to prefer to vote in person on Election Day—a partisan divide that persists today. Yet Mr. Trump’s crusade against mail-in votes that year alarmed Republican legislative leaders, who privately tried explaining to him that many of the party’s own voters were older and cast ballots that way.

Anyway, well done, folks. Now the next step is to realize that his assault on the electoral process is merely a piece of everything that his personal and political life has been about. The step after that is realizing it was the ignorance, racism, and civic indolence of the American people that caused this whole mess, and that the elite political media in this country encouraged that toxic combination by framing it as some kind of lost civic virtue. All those Ohio diners. All those ignorami.

But that’s all for tomorrow. Baby steps, people. Baby steps.