The U.S.'s election systems are secure and fair, but that's harder for many to believe after a decade of lies from the president.
he was adding a $200 million ballroom. In the 11 months since, the estimated cost of the project that he repeatedly boasts is: a renamed, redesigned Trump-Kennedy Center, a 250-foot triumphal arch, a so-called heroes garden of 250 statues, a $13 million resurfaced Reflecting Pool, gold-leafed equestrian statues, a South Lawn arena for Sunday’s UFC cage fights celebrating Trump’s 80th birthday and a new plan he sprung just last week for athe memorial dedicated by law to the assassinated President Kennedy, thanks to a court order with which officials actually seem to be complying. Other Trump projects also faceBut there’s an extra noxious irony of Trump’s imperial building spree.
It’s underway even as he continues his decade-plus teardown of the metaphorical foundations of democracy: trust in free and fair elections. Trump’s Big Lie about rigged elections and Democrats’ supposed cheating — California being his latest target — is by now so familiar that many of us are all but inured to it, and have been for a long time. That’s understandable, and arguably good for our mental health, but collectively dangerous for the nation.
The majority of Republican voters accept the lie as truth. What better time than the summer of the nation’s 250th anniversary of independence to reflect on how Trump’s years of lying have corroded the citizenry’s essential belief in the integrity of elections? Attention must be paid, especially ahead of midterm elections in November.
With Republican candidates expected to get a drubbing given Trump’s unpopularity, the president is expected to cry fraud in response — or, worse, employ the powers of government, even the military, to contest the results. Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has “I fear that foreign interference is no longer the most pressing danger to our elections,” Warner began an op-ed in late March in the New York Times.
“It is increasingly evident that the greatest threat now comes from inside our own government. ” What might lie ahead is of course well worth contemplating and guarding against however we can. But let us not overlook the damage Trump has already done to the body politic. Not so long ago, Americans generally took for granted that elections were on the up and up.
With each year, more Americans don’t even recall such halcyon days. If I had a dollar for every time Trump has baselessly cried “rigged election” since 2015, I could build my own ballroom.. Worse, millions of future voters are growing up not believing as I did that U.S. elections were a model for the world. Instead too many accept as a given of public discourse that our elections are suspect and an embarrassment to the world.
Because no less than the president of the United States says so. Just last month in the Oval Office, Trump was surrounded by young students as he slumped in his chair at the Resolute Desk , and his meandering remarks included yet again a denial of his 2020 defeat: “Bad things happened. It was a rigged election. ” What an education for those youngsters.
Directly from the first presidential candidate in U.S. history to reject an election result and refuse to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power to another. A role model he’s not. Trump’s tirades against California have predictably come in response to the state’s usual slow count after last week’s elections of the overwhelming number of mail-in ballots .
On Tuesday evening, his baseless case was further undercut when Republican Steve Hilton won the second spot on November’s ballot for governor, up against Democrat Xavier Becerra.on Sunday, Trump was so irate at being told that he had no evidence, none, to support allegations that both the California elections and his 2020 loss were rigged that he ended the interview.
“We’re like a third-world country. Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked,” he told moderator Kristen Welker . Current Trump-fearing Republican officeholders and office-seekers — including Hilton; Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California now obsequiously— all refuse to call the president on his lies.
By contrast, it was eight former Republican officeholders, including former senators and federal judges, who in 2022 issued a report,But for Trump’s narcissism and insecurity it would be inexplicable that, reelected in 2024, he’d still be lying about 2020 and undermining Americans’ faith in democracy. He may succeed in building monuments to himself, but here’s hoping the American people refuse to let him do to democracy what he did to the East Wing.
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content. The article argues that while Trump pursues grandiose, self-branded construction projects in the nation’s capital, the far more consequential “renovation” is his long-running demolition of the public’s faith in free and fair elections, chiefly through the repeated propagation of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
It contends that Trump’s “Big Lie” has moved from shock value to background noise, yet remains dangerous precisely because it has become normalized, with polling and research showing that a large share of Republican voters now believe the 2020 election was illegitimate and view American elections as vulnerable to theft. The piece maintains that Trump’s insistence on calling U.S. elections “rigged” and “third-world” – including his continued denial of his 2020 loss in public interviews and photo ops – has helped socialize younger Americans into seeing election results as inherently suspect, undercutting the idea of the United States as a democratic model for the world.
It argues that declining trust in the voting process, especially among Republicans, has concrete consequences: when people accept the notion that the system is fixed, they are more likely to disengage from voting or to support anti-democratic measures in the name of “saving” the country, a pattern the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group has documented among those who believe 2020 was “stolen. ”The article criticizes current Republican officeholders, candidates, and Trump appointees who echo or refuse to contradict Trump’s falsehoods, portraying them as complicit in eroding democratic norms, and contrasts their silence with efforts by former Republican officials who have publicly debunked claims of a stolen 2020 election.
It highlights Trump’s fixation on mail-in voting and on states such as California as part of a broader campaign to cast ordinary administrative features of elections as corrupt, even as courts and election officials have repeatedly found no evidence of the large-scale fraud he alleges; this pattern aligns with analyses that describe a systematic attempt by the Trump camp to preemptively undermine confidence in upcoming elections. The piece underscores warnings from figures such as Sen.
Mark Warner that the most serious threat to U.S. elections now comes from within the government itself rather than from foreign actors, echoing scholarly work that describes Trump’s use of institutional distrust as a deliberate political strategy rather than an incidental side effect. It further suggests that if Trump faces electoral setbacks in future contests, the country should expect renewed, baseless fraud claims and even potential attempts to use governmental power to contest losses, a concern mirrored in civil-liberties and voting-rights analyses that forecast intensified attacks on voting access and democratic safeguards in a renewed Trump era.
Ultimately, the article urges readers not to become numb to Trump’s rhetoric, arguing that protecting U.S. democracy now requires active defense of election administrators, repudiation of unfounded fraud narratives, and a refusal to let Trump do to democratic institutions what the article says is being done to Washington’s physical landmarks. Some Republican voters and activists contend that doubts about the 2020 election and subsequent contests are not attempts to sabotage democracy but expressions of sincere concern about irregularities and weak safeguards, a dynamic documented by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, which finds that many who believe the election was “stolen” see themselves as defending, not rejecting, democratic principles.
In addition, Trump and close allies routinely argue that questioning election outcomes is a legitimate check on power and that investigations, audits, and tighter rules on issues such as mail-in ballots, voter identification, and ballot collection are necessary to restore confidence, even as courts and most election officials have not substantiated claims of widespread fraud. Moreover, some analysts on the right stress that mistrust in government long predates Trump and that Republican skepticism toward institutions has been cultivated over decades in reaction to what is seen as bureaucratic overreach and media bias; academic work on Trump’s rhetoric places it within this longer conservative tradition of mobilizing distrust, suggesting the phenomenon is broader than one political figure.
Critics of the article’s emphasis on Trump alone also argue that Democrats and liberal activists have, at times, cast doubt on election legitimacy — for example, in disputes over the 2000 and 2004 presidential results or in rhetoric about “voter suppression” — and that this history, combined with modern disinformation and polarization, has produced a bipartisan crisis of confidence in elections rather than a problem caused exclusively by Trump.
Polling further indicates that worries about “stolen” elections are not confined to Republican voters: a recent Politico survey found that more than a third of Americans believe it is at least somewhat likely that the 2026 midterm elections could be stolen, with Democrats more focused on voter suppression and Republicans on voter fraud, suggesting that different communities attribute the same anxiety to different perceived threats in the system.
Some election-policy advocates and officials argue that, despite intense rhetoric, U.S. election infrastructure has proved resilient, citing the orderly conduct of recent federal elections and ongoing reforms such as expanded use of paper ballots, post-election audits, and updated security protocols; the current administration’s 2025 executive order on “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections” is presented as evidence of an institutional commitment to strengthening election security and transparency rather than presiding over democratic backsliding. From this vantage point, the central challenge is not only Trump’s language but a broader need to address vulnerabilities, improve communication about how elections work, and implement bipartisan reforms that can reassure skeptical voters across the political spectrum that results are both accurate and legitimate.
It turns out you can burn down a neighborhood and not destroy a community. We’ve seen evidence of this all across L.A. and so we will head back to one neighborhood that’s a good example of that bond: West Poppyfields Drive in Altadena. Today we discuss one of the pivotal events of the 1960s: the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
Though the gunman was caught at the scene, confessed at trial, and even bragged about the shooting, his motives have largely been forgotten. Modern LA earned its first smoggy nickname 450 years ago, as the “bay of smokes.
” At the La Brea tar pits, we take a short walk through a long history with curator Regan Dunn, who explains how and why the first Angelenos would have set fires that filled the broad bowl of LA and foretold the curse of smog.
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