It was a day ending in Y—except for the fact that a federal magistrate judge was convinced by the evidence she saw that there’s probable cause to believe a crime involving elections was committed in Fulton County. Per the Wall Street Journal, “the warrant … said the materials were being sought as part of an investigation into possible violations of federal law against destroying election records and another statute dealing with the submission of fraudulent votes.”
That’s genuinely interesting. Turns out the 2020 election was rigged after all.
Probable cause.
The 2020 election in Georgia was examined by Trump’s own campaign, members of his first administration, and state officials led by a Republican governor and Republican secretary of state. The closest anyone has come to identifying meaningful wrongdoing in Fulton County was human error that led to some absentee ballots being double-counted but didn’t affect the outcome.
One consultant to the president’s 2020 operation who looked into the possibility of fraud sounded flabbergasted when the Journal asked him about the FBI’s Fulton County raid. “That election is six years in the past,” he said. “There’s no undoing it. I can’t imagine there aren’t more important things to look at.”
Trump’s reelection in 2024 made an obsession that was already absurd that much more so. How and why would the vote have been successfully rigged against him six years ago, when his own staff wielded the power of the federal government, but not successfully rigged against him four years later when the Biden administration was at the helm? Did the cabal that stuffed the ballot boxes in 2020 have a change of heart and turn MAGA in the interim?
To believe in 2026 that Trump’s loss to Joe Biden was a product of chicanery is like still believing in Santa when you’re 20 years old. Yet the judge who signed the warrant obviously saw something in the evidence to suggest criminal activity. What did she see?
I suppose the feds might have uncovered honest-to-goodness proof of vote-rigging that eluded everyone else, true vindication for the president at last. That would throw Georgia’s 16 electoral votes into doubt—although not the result of the national election, which Biden won by a margin of 74. Time for Tulsi Gabbard to start raiding election archives in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania too, I suppose.
More likely is that the feds have evidence of some type of malfeasance that didn’t impact the result in Georgia. No one (except possibly Trump) believes the result of the 2020 election will be overturned retroactively; the point of this investigation—or one point, rather—is to simply flatter the president’s aggrieved paranoia about Georgia and give him a pretext to say “I told you so” about his suspicions of what happened there. The fact that Fulton County also happens to be the jurisdiction that tried to prosecute him for election tampering is icing on the cake.
Credibility.
There’s a third possible explanation for the search warrant, though, one we wouldn’t normally consider but are now obliged to. Maybe the evidence the feds presented to the judge to obtain the warrant was bogus.
Following yesterday’s raid, the chairman of Fulton County’s Board of Commissioners warned reporters that he can’t vouch for the integrity of 2020 election ballots now that they’re in Trump’s and Gabbard’s custody. “Once they left that facility last night in those FBI trucks, I don’t [know] where they are now. I don’t know what they’re doing with them,” he said. “Are they opening the boxes? Are they stuffing other ballots into there? I have no clue.”
In a political vacuum that would be an outlandish accusation, every bit as conspiratorial as the president’s own fantasies about ballot-stuffing. But the raid didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened under an administration that twice in the last month alone lied straight to Americans’ faces about why its officers had killed people after video proof of the truth was already circulating.
And while, in the past, it might have been unfair to hold lies told by loathsome political toadies like Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller against Justice Department prosecutors who are bound by a code of ethics, it no longer is.
The same FBI that carried out the Fulton County search has spent the past year rifling through its files to find excuses to harass the president’s political enemies. Just this morning, former CNN anchor and longtime Trump critic Don Lemon was arrested “at the direction” of Attorney General Pam Bondi for his part in a disruptive protest at a Minneapolis church—even though one federal judge had already refused to sign an arrest warrant for him and, reportedly, federal prosecutors in two different offices believed charging Lemon would be unethical.
Last fall, the website Just Security published a long analysis supported by scores of recent judicial rulings to make the case that the Trump Justice Department should no longer be entitled in court to the “presumption of regularity”—that is, to the presumption that the claims it makes are factual and offered in good faith. Why should anyone extend that presumption to how they went about securing a search warrant in Fulton County, or how they’ll handle the 2020 ballots they left with?
I repeat here for emphasis what I said elsewhere recently: There is no doubt that this scummy administration, with our scummy DOJ’s help, would have misled the public and covered up the circumstances in which Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed had recordings by witnesses not made that impossible. A law enforcement agency that’s worked day and night to obliterate its own credibility by faithfully executing the president’s many “retribution” fantasies isn’t entitled to a lick of grace on its election investigation in Georgia from anyone.
Which is not to imply that the Fulton County search was mainly about retribution.
November.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Trump’s obsession with 2020 isn’t entirely backward-looking. There’s an election coming in November, he’s plainly worried about it, and he should be. In fact, when he was asked yesterday what Gabbard was doing at an FBI operation, he answered in forward-looking terms: “She’s working very hard on trying to keep the election safe.”
He’s going to try to tamper with the midterms. It’s not just a matter of character being destiny, either. The logic of postliberalism leaves him no choice.
The Times identified the scheme that’s likely in motion in Georgia. In 2021, in response to local “rigged election” insanity, the state’s new voting law empowered the Republican-dominated State Election Board to take over a county’s election office if local officials are behaving incompetently. Fulton, which includes Atlanta, just so happens to be the most populous county in Georgia and tilts heavily Democratic. If Republicans are willing to stoop to out-and-out crookedness to oust Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff this fall, seizing control of ballot-counting in one of his strongholds will greatly boost their chances.
“The [Georgia election] board … has asked for the Justice Department’s help in investigating Fulton County,” the Times noted—and now, conveniently, it’s gotten it. Yesterday’s search warrant will help establish the pretext that the local GOP needs to commandeer Fulton County’s election office.
That’s not the only way Bondi’s DOJ is amplifying Republican election messaging, either. Last week, in a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz dated the same day that Alex Pretti was killed, she proposed several “common sense solutions” to the ICE crisis in Minneapolis. One seemed to come out of left field: Give my department access to your state’s voter rolls, she demanded, so that we can make sure your voter registration practices comply with federal law.
That request isn’t ridiculous on its face. But coming from a stooge-ified Justice Department, it stinks of a political ploy. The president will inevitably explain Republican losses this fall with fantasies about immigrants voting illegally en masse (he’s done it before); Bondi is helping to lay the groundwork for that by casting aspersions on Minnesota’s election integrity practices at a moment when its immigrant population is in the national spotlight.
And in laying that groundwork, she wasn’t above using Homeland Security’s masked goon squad as leverage. The threat is implied: The state’s intimidation campaign will continue until the voter rolls are surrendered.
If nothing else, then, the Fulton County search will provide rhetorical ammunition to help the right cope during its next psychological breakdown over a painful election defeat. Should Democrats rout the GOP in November, the suspicions stoked by yesterday’s raid will make it easier for populist Republicans to believe that the outcome is illegitimate. (Fear not, the real truth will come out in six years or so.)
But I suspect the Times is right that the plan in Georgia—and elsewhere—involves more than cope and spin this time.
The next rigged election.
To repeat the key point from yesterday’s newsletter, postliberalism prioritizes favorable outcomes over fair process, and ruthlessly so. The MAGA right’s reaction to Minneapolis is an example. They don’t care about ICE’s abuses or its culture of impunity or the fact that two Americans are dead. They care about outcomes and will justify egregious processes that achieve them. Terrorizing illegal immigrants will lead to less illegal immigration. Shoving, tackling, and occasionally shooting left-wing protesters will lead to fewer left-wing protests.
The same postliberal mentality explains why Greenland remains an irritant for Trump. Acquiring the island would be a favorable outcome for the United States and for him personally, cementing his legacy of national greatness by expanding America’s borders. No one can stop his army from taking it by force should he give the order. What’s stopping him is process, specifically the postwar liberal consensus that territorial acquisitions are illegitimate unless they occur through peaceful processes between willing parties—and Denmark isn’t willing. It’s driving the president batty, I’m sure, to be stymied by Americans’ reservations about his means when it’s within his power to secure the end he desires.
Elections are an affront to the postliberal sensibility in the same way that the Greenland is and the Minneapolis episodes are. There’s only one outcome to this fall’s midterms that the right will regard as favorable and the democratic process appears poised not to deliver that outcome. Why shouldn’t they and their leader prioritize good outcomes over fair process, as usual, by interfering with the latter to improve their chances of the former?
The existential stakes in which postliberals routinely frame elections make interfering with the midterms that much more tempting. No one, Trump included, believes failing to acquire Greenland would be the end of America. Few, Trump included, believe that retreating from Minneapolis would be the end of America—although in the furthest Matt Walsh-ian reaches of the online chud right, you might hear the claim made. But losing control of the federal government? That’s always an irreparable calamity. “Flight 93” logic is eternal.
And so the ethos of Trumpism points always and inexorably toward refusing to relinquish power in the name of averting a national “emergency.” It would betray the spirit of a rotten movement to graciously stand aside and permit Americans to make the supposedly suicidal mistake of returning power to Democrats. The president and his toadies might not go fully nuclear over the midterm by attempting to cancel it or overturn the results—although one never knows—as they’d doubtless prefer to save that playbook for the next presidential contest. But they’ll look for, and occasionally even create, pretexts to intervene in the process in various ways. The Fulton County raid is one such pretext, almost needless to say.
In fact, as I think more about it, it strikes me as a perfect miniature of this era. It’s a superb pairing of Trump’s two most distinctive and probably most durable contributions to mainstream American political culture: conspiratorial rationalizing and imperious authoritarianism.
Yesterday, hours after the powerful federal police agency he commands seized election recordds in a U.S. state, the president promoted a barely lucid post on Truth Social alleging that the 2020 election was rigged by Barack Obama, the Chinese government, U.S. intelligence, and Italian officials, with “the Dubai Embassy” tossed in as a go-between. Reelecting him in 2024, after four long years of him chattering endlessly about the “rigged election,” necessarily meant lending the force of law to his paranoid fantasies. Americans sowed the wind, and yesterday Fulton County reaped the whirlwind.
From Minneapolis to Greenland, power has granted postliberals the opportunity to fulfill all sorts of perverse fantasies. They won’t pass on their opportunity to fulfill another in November.
