This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.  It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Months before the 2020 election, as tens of millions of people prepared to vote by mail in the midst of a deadly pandemic, President Donald Trump was already laying the groundwork for challenging the result if it did not go his way. Mail ballots, he said in April, are “very dangerous” and “fraudulent in many cases.” In July, he warned that 2020 would be “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” In August, he told his followers that the “only way” he could possibly lose the election is if Democrats “rigged” it against him.

After the election, which Trump indeed lost in decisive fashion, his warnings only got more shrill, more dire, and more vaguely messianic. In December, he delivered a speech railing against the scourge of “corrupt forces … stuffing ballot boxes,” and blamed Biden’s victory on “fraud and abuse…on a scale never seen before.” His efforts to contest the outcome, Trump said, were “about ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election and in all future elections”—a task that he said might prove to be his “single greatest achievement.” 

Unfortunately for Trump, neither his initial legal challenges nor his subsequent efforts to incite a violent coup were sufficient to get him what he wanted. But as I predicted at the time, in Republican circles, Trump did manage to mainstream the belief that states that allow mail-in voting are at least facilitating cheating, if not outright encouraging it. Today, adherence to Trump’s stolen-election conspiracy theories remains table stakes for anyone who aspires to be relevant in the Republican Party and/or the conservative legal movement.

Watson v. Republican National Committee, which the Supreme Court decided on Monday, reveals just how deeply election denialism is........

© Talking Points Memo