"It's working. They believe it": Experts warn Trump preparing “next version of Stop the Steal"

Kamala Harris' emergence as the Democratic Party's standard-bearer has been met with barrage of claims by former President Donald Trump and his allies that the vice president seized the party nomination in an undemocratic coup and is preparing to rig the election against him. The accusations, barely mentioned at the Republican National Convention in July, are reaching an ever more fevered pitch as Harris pulls ahead of Trump in election polling, with the former president labeling any inconvenience or obstacle for him as an example of election interference.

“This was an overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow,” Trump declared at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, referring to President Joe Biden giving way to Harris on the ticket. “They deposed a president," he continued. "It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”

In the headier months for Trump when he was leading an apparently tired, stumbling Biden in the polls, the former president crowed that his victory was fait accompli and that the only way Democrats could win was if they cheated. Now that Harris is surging, Trump is saying that's exactly what is happening.

Trump's attempts to cast doubt on election integrity are an echo of his 2020 strategy, where claims that the election was stolen from him by Democratic cheating culminated in an attempted insurrection by his own supporters on January 6, 2021. If he loses again in 2024, those efforts may once again rile his far-right supporters into violence or be weaponized into more a more concrete campaign to overturn the election results, according to national security experts who spoke to the Washington Post.

“This is Donald Trump’s playbook: ‘There’s a deep state, they’re all out to get me,’” said Elizabeth Neumann, a senior official in Trump's Department of Homeland Security. “Even here — as he’s going to have to face a stronger, harder candidate to defeat — his default is, ‘Well, this couldn’t possibly be legal. This is a coup. This is wrong,’ even though there are no facts to back that up.”

While some of the rhetoric is “just for show,” Neumann added, Trump and his allies are also laying the groundwork for the “next version of ‘Stop the Steal.’”

“They’re latching on to this, that what the Democrats just did, that’s a coup,” former Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., told the outlet. “This is what I hear all day. That was the attack on democracy. That’s what they’re going to do to push back on the legitimate charge that Trump tried to overthrow an election four years ago. I come from MAGA world. It’s working. They believe it.”

Since his first election experience in the 2016 Iowa Caucuses, Trump has used a litany of excuses to explain his losses, including claims that millions of people voted illegally and Democrats mailed in torrents of fraudulent mail-in ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, Trump is falsely accusing the Harris of unlawfully deposing Biden (even though primary voters chose delegates who are free to pledge to another nominee) and using AI images to inflate her crowd sizes, calling for her disqualification on those grounds.

Trump is refusing to commit to accepting the outcome of the election should he lose. "If everything's honest, I'll gladly accept the results, I don't change on that," Trump told the Milwauee Journal Sentinel. "If it's not, you have to fight for the right of the country."