The election that never ends: Inside Trump World’s endless relitigating of 2020

On June 8, Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, was asked on CNBC whether there was anything to the conspiracy theories swirling around California’s slow-counted primary results. He stopped a hair short of alleging fraud, then spent the next two minutes implying it anyway.

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“On the integrity side, we’re doing an absolutely terrible job,” he said. “And the American people are right to question it.” 

When CNBC host Becky Quick pointed out that California can take weeks to count its ballots because of its laws on mail-in ballots and same-day registration, Clayton didn’t back down.

“No, there’s a great phrase: opportunity for fraud,” he said. “It makes you ask: Is mail-in voting being used by one group and not another — whether it’s being used honestly or honestly and dishonestly is a question that now everyone is asking.”

Within days, Trump nominated Clayton to run the nation’s intelligence apparatus. 

A willingness to entertain or outright embrace 2020-style election fraud conspiracy theories has become a litmus test for entry into the Trump administration’s upper ranks — and once there, is just as often the surest way to survive. When an official’s standing starts to slip — a bad news cycle, a sidelining, a looming firing, a confirmation fight — one of the few levers left is to be seen vindicating the president’s conviction that American elections are being stolen whenever he or his party lose. 

The maneuver has become common enough to have a recognizable arc. For some, it has meant durability through scandals that would have ended a career in another era. For others, it has been a last bid for relevance before the exit. The card often gets played; it does not always win.

The fixation begins with the president himself. What one senior administration official called Trump’s “obsession” with relitigating the 2020 election has become an organizing principle of his second term. Within hours of his inauguration, he pardoned 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants — the first of many moves to recast a violent attempt to overturn a certified election as noble martyrdom deserving reward. He has expected his Cabinet to keep chasing debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election; rolled out a White House task force to declassify records related to the 2020 presidential election; and has empowered election denier Kurt Olsen with a broad remit to pursue election fraud from within the administration, and with the imprimatur of state legitimacy. 

The White House defended the administration’s election-related efforts as fulfilling a core campaign promise.

“President Trump — and his entire administration — is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to MS NOW. 

Hardly a rally, interview or public appearance goes by without Trump repeating the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. It also drives Trump’s legislative agenda. Over the last several weeks, the president has essentially frozen the legislative calendar on Capitol Hill — pausing Clayton’s nomination process, canceling plans to sign a major bipartisan housing bill, freezing out a reauthorization of a critical intelligence-gathering power — to pressure GOP lawmakers to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, a strict voter-identification bill he has justified with groundless claims of mass voter fraud by noncitizens.

“This is still a central tenet of MAGA and an inspiration for people to get to the polls is the 2020 election,” said a person close to the Trump administration, who was granted anonymity to speak about a sensitive topic. “You want permanent job security? It’s getting focused on where his priorities are. And this is a super priority.” 

Kash Patel’s tenure leading the FBI has offered one of the clearer examples of how it works. Few Trump administration officials have generated as many damaging headlines and few have proven as durable. Two days after The Atlantic published deeply sourced allegations of Patel’s drinking and erratic behavior — the kind of story that, in an earlier era, might have ended his career within a day — Patel, who has denied those allegations, told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo that the DOJ would soon make arrests related to the 2020 election. 

One senior White House official, asked last month about Patel’s job security, pointed to his work on the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nonprofit legal advocacy group, on fraud and money laundering charges, and to his 2020 election-related arrests as a buffer against an imminent firing. Patel, acting on an ongoing priority of the president’s, leapt into public action to announce the indictment at the end of April. 

The SPLC case has drawn skepticism from career prosecutors over its legal foundations; whistleblowers later told MS NOW the indictment had been rushed. 

But for Trump and Patel’s purposes, the redirection worked: Trump has long been suspicious of the law center, and the indictment prompted him to post on Truth Social that if the allegations were true, “the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books.”

“He’s still acting on the president’s priorities,” the person close to the administration explained. 

In a statement to MS NOW, an FBI spokesperson said that “election integrity is one of the top priorities of this FBI and we continue to work around the clock to pursue criminal actors who seek to undermine our system and the rule of law.” 

Other top officials have followed the same playbook, even as the administration has yet to surface any evidence of an election conspiracy against Trump. Asked whether the pursuit of election fraud was a prerequisite for a Cabinet post, the senior White House official said that any appointee had to “be a person who is open to the possibility that we have election security issues.”

“Election integrity has a wide range of issues: foreign interference … we know some people have voted multiple times — so it has to be someone who has an open mind and understands the issue and is willing to investigate,” said the official, whose identity is known to MS NOW and who was granted anonymity to address internal issues. “Whether they come up with anything? It’s important for someone who will take the time, understands the issue and will get to the bottom of whether anything will happen.”