At his racist hate-filled rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, Donald Trump said he has a "secret" plan with regards to the House of Representatives in the 2024 election, a comment that has legal experts worried he’s concocting yet another plan to try to steal the election.
"I think with our little secret we're gonna do really well with the House, right?” Trump said from the stage, following a string of other speakers who disparaged Latinos, Puerto Ricans, Black people, Palestinians, and Jews, and who made misogynistic comments about Vice President Kamala Harris. “Our little secret is having a big impact. He [House Speaker Mike Johnson] and I have a secret. We'll tell you what it is when the race is over."
It's unclear what exactly Trump was referring to with his “secret.” But legal experts worry that Trump is saying he has a plan to send the results of the election to the House, where the Republican majority will declare Trump the winner.
“Clearest indication yet that if Trump loses, the plan is to sow enough doubt about election results in key states so that the House can declare a contingent election and proclaim Trump the victor,” Jacob Glick, a lawyer who worked on the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, wrote in a post on X.
Trump's allies already say he has a plan to challenge the election if he comes up short against Harris, saying he will declare victory on election night, even if he is behind, and make up lies about voter fraud to try to challenge the results in court.
That’s the same playbook Trump used in 2020, which ultimately led to a violent riot at the U.S. Capitol after Trump incited his followers to try to stop the certification of now-President Joe Biden’s win.
Because of the insurrection, Congress passed a law in 2022 to make it harder for Trump to employ this tactic again. It raises the number of members of Congress who can trigger an objection to certifying the results, and explicitly bans a candidate from providing an alternate slate of Electoral College electors, as Trump’s campaign tried to do in order to steal the election in 2020.
All of this comes as 69% of registered voters think Trump won't accept the results of the election nor concede the race if he loses, according to a poll by SSRS for CNN. The same poll found, however, that 88% of voters believe the loser of the race has an obligation to concede.
It’s hard to believe that such a large majority of voters think it’s an obligation for a candidate to accept the election results, yet will vote for Trump, whom they believe wouldn’t concede in the event of a loss.
In eight days, we’ll see if voters’ cognitive dissonance causes them to do the right thing.
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