Election Security, Trump-Style
If you go to Republican National Committee headquarters, one thing you’ll notice, Lara Trump explained onstage Friday night, “is that the bulk of the staff — the bodies that are actually in the R.N.C. building — are dedicated to one cause: election integrity.”
She was sitting between her husband, Eric, and Jason Simmons, who is the new North Carolina G.O.P. chair, on three stools before a few hundred delegates at tables decorated with red and white roses, at the state’s party convention in Greensboro, N.C. Some were wearing red, white and blue stickers with a message about cleaning up the voter rolls. One statewide candidate promised to “audit” the voting machinery and technology. “Election integrity,” in Donald Trump’s telling, tends to be about the past; party co-chairs like Ms. Trump usually talk about the present.
Soon after, Eric called his father, put him on speaker, and piped his voice right into the microphone to a thrilled crowd. The three sat onstage, motionless, as Mr. Trump talked about the border, then eventually, came to North Carolina. He won the state in 2016, then again in 2020. North Carolina, Mr. Trump said, “was with us, and it was with us right from the beginning, and it stayed that way — whereas Pennsylvania, Georgia, a lot of them were with us, then all of the sudden …”
North Carolina, the ostensible battleground state that Mr. Trump won in 2020, poses a problem to Mr. Trump’s theory that the election was stolen from him. Theoretically, that Mr. Trump won while a Democrat won the governorship offers the best proof of all that the election was not stolen. But perhaps because to concede his own success in one place would render his failure elsewhere unbearable, Mr. Trump must instead believe that fraud took place there as well, and that Michael Whatley defeated it.
Earlier this year, when Mr. Trump backed Mr. Whatley, then North Carolina Republican chair, to become R.N.C. chair, sources told The Times that the “overwhelming reason” is that he is “a stop the steal guy.” Last month, at a rally near Allentown, Pa., on a brisk night, Mr. Trump introduced Mr. Whatley: “He’s going to stop voter theft. He’s going to stop them stealing the vote; he’s going to stop stop the steal.”
Mr. Trump’s obsession with the 2020 election and focus on “election integrity” doesn’t just work in a backward-looking way “Election integrity” is shaping the future of what a second Trump term would look like in terms of his staff. A stated belief in election fraud claims can sometimes make or break someone’s standing in the party.
