Donald Trump suffers from chronic election denialism that goes well beyond his well-known insistence, against all evidence, that he won the 2020 presidential election. Trump actually misstates all of his presidential results. He’s said he was robbed of a popular-vote win in 2016 by massive illegal voting and fraudulent vote counting. And Trump has never been satisfied by the 2024 election results, in which he won the Electoral College but only beat Kamala Harris by a slim 1.5 percent of the popular vote. He keeps telling us he won by a massive, historic landslide, never entirely making it clear whether he’s just spinning the numbers or padding his lead with more undocumented voter-fraud fables.

Worse yet, Trump gradually got into the habit of election denialism on behalf of other losing Republican candidates. By 2024, his obsessive focus on the evils of immigration led him to embrace the basics of the Great Replacement Theory, which claims Democrats deliberately herd millions of illegal immigrants to the polls to steal elections at every level. And so now Trump sees fraud behind every Republican defeat in states like California, and shows every indication that he likely won’t accept a Democratic victory in the 2026 midterms. The effect on rank-and-file Republicans’ faith in free and fair elections is predictably dire.

But election denialism isn’t an isolated vice in MAGA-land. Trump has championed poll denialism, too. This helps make election denialism plausible to his committed followers, as Media Matters explains:

Trump is an historically unpopular president. Polls over the decade since he entered the political spotlight have consistently found that he is broadly disliked, and his job approval is currently tracking near its all-time lows. …The president has responded to........

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