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By Barton Gellman
Mr. Gellman is a senior adviser at the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U. School of Law.
At first glance, President Trump’s Truth Social post alleging voting fraud did not look especially alarming — not, anyway, by this president’s singular standards. Mr. Trump’s long-debunked lies about stolen elections are no less malignant in 2025 than they were in 2020 and 2021, during his concerted effort to overturn his loss at the polls. Still, by now, persistent repetition has diminished the power of those lies to shock.
And yet something quite shocking did emerge from a second journey through the mangled syntax of Mr. Trump’s diatribe against “MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and “VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER.”
