Trump’s New Hampshire rally showed how he’s already sowing discord about the 2020 election

President Donald Trump was impeached for trying to pressure Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election. Events at and surrounding his first post-acquittal rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Monday night indicate that there is plenty more where the Ukraine scandal came from.

While Trump isn’t facing a significant primary challenge in the state, he and his campaign deployed a number of dirty tricks designed to disrupt Tuesday’s Democratic presidential primary — including holding his rally ahead of the primary to depress turnout, a barrage of disinformation, and straight-up physical intimidation.

“Advisers hoped that Secret Service moves in downtown Manchester to secure the area for the president’s arrival would also make it harder for Democratic candidates and their supporters to transverse the state’s largest city in the hours before the primary’s first votes are cast, according to Trump campaign officials not authorized to discuss internal deliberations publicly,” the Jill Colvin and Jonathan Lemire reported for the Associated Press on Tuesday.

You’d hope the supposed leader of the free world would respect the principle of free and fair elections enough to not intentionally make life difficult for people trying to exercise their right to vote. This president does not. And while physical roadblocks impeding poll access are about as blatant as election interference can gets, Trump deployed a number of more subtle tactics toward that same end during his speech.

Trump is preemptively delegitimizing the election results

Sen. Bernie Sanders is perhaps the current frontrunner not only to win New Hampshire’s primary, but to ultimately become the Democratic nominee for president. But in the event Sanders does not prevail, Democratic hopes of defeating Trump will hinge in part on the extent to which the senator’s supporters prove willing to vote for whoever the nominee is.

Trump seems to understand this, and so he devoted part of his speech on the eve of the New Hampshire primary by taking a page out of the 2016 playbook to simultaneously demoralize Sanders supporters and sow seeds of division among Democrats.

“I think they’re trying to take it away from Bernie again. I think Bernie came in second. Can you believe it?” Trump said, alluding to the results of the botched Iowa caucuses. “They’re doing it to you again, Bernie! They’re doing it to you again.”

Suffice it to say, there is no evidence the Democratic National Committee is conspiring against Sanders. And in the event that a Democrat prevails in November, Trump seems to have a plan for trying to hold onto office — tossing out wild accusations of election fraud in hopes of drawing the results in question.

Referring to his narrow loss in New Hampshire in 2016, Trump claimed that “we should have won the election, but they had buses being shipped up from Massachusetts. Hundreds and hundreds of buses.”

As I explained earlier on Tuesday, this conspiracy theory is bunk. But the merits of it don’t really matter. In the not-far-fetched possibility that Trump is defeated by a narrow margin in the Electoral College, he could use conspiracy theories of this sort to sow doubt. It’s not hard to imagine a compliant judiciary and Senate giving merit a veneer of legitimacy to them. And the fact Trump refuses to accept the results of an election he ultimately won shows that a sense of shame won’t deter him from such desperate measures.

Trump 2020 will be a bit like Nixon running for a third term after a Watergate acquittal

Perhaps even more shameless than his election fraud conspiracy theory was Trump’s repeated calls to his supporters to tarnish New Hampshire’s semi-open Democratic primary by casting ballots for weak candidates.

“I hear a lot of Republicans tomorrow will vote for the weakest candidate possible, of the Democrats. Does that make sense? You people wouldn’t do that,” Trump said sarcastically at one point on Monday, adding later: “If you want to vote for a weak candidate tomorrow, go ahead. Pick the weakest one.”

To be clear, even if we’d like to expect better from the president, urging supporters to use a Nixonian dirty trick of that sort isn’t illegal and, since it falls within the rules, arguably falls short of cheating.

It’s also worth remembering that one of the arguments used during Trump’s successful impeachment trial defense was that anything the president does to help his reelection chances short of explicit crimes is in the national interest, and hence not impeachable.

As I detailed during the trial, that line of argument excuses almost anything Trump might do to defeat whoever prevails in the Democratic primary — including benefiting from foreign interference, strategically deploying the Secret Service to make life difficult for Democratic campaigns and their supporters, or sensationalizing purported national security threats to scare people.

The Watergate scandal stemmed from Nixon’s efforts to cheat in the 1972 election. The full scope of the scandal only came into public view in 1973 and ’74, and he was ultimately forced to resign under pressure from Republicans. Trump was similarly caught in the act, but instead of being pushed out of office, he was given a clean bill of political health by Republicans.

If Monday is any indication, what this means in practice is that the Democrat running against Trump will not only have to overcome the power of incumbency to ultimately be sworn into office, but also misinformation, dirty tricks, and perhaps even last-ditch conspiracy theories. And the president isn’t even trying to hide it.

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