One of the time-honored, irrefutable laws of the political right is to accuse others of doing heinous things that you’re actually doing yourself. This classic “gaslighting” technique is now routinely employed by the likes of all prominent Republicans, from strategists like Steve Bannon to run of the mill sycophants like Marjorie Taylor Greene, to the the lodestone of the GOP’s irrational, amoral universe himself, Donald Trump.

After Trump weighed the abysmal optics and abruptly bailed on his planned Jan. 6 speech to “counter” President Joe Biden’s address to the nation that day, he pivoted last week to hold a rally in Florence, a tiny Arizona town known chiefly for its prison. Most major media gave only scant coverage to this event in which Trump regurgitated his usual litany of lies about the 2020 election, playing to a bubble of hardcore supporters who fully believe that election was somehow stolen from their hero.

As noted by John L. Dorman, reporting for Insider, Trump dutifully stoked these delusions by pointing to the size of the crowd (reportedly about 15,000 people, according to the Arizona Republic) and the fact that cars were backed up “for 25 miles” waiting to see and hear him. In terms of substance, the most prominent (and bizarre) new claim by Trump was that the Biden administration and Democratic governors are denying white people treatments for COVID-19 in favor of Black and Latino people. As reported by John T. Bennett in Roll Call, Trump asserted “If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics …You get it based on race. In fact, in New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical help. Think of it. If you’re white, you go right to the back of the line.”

The poisonous character of that lie is certainly bad enough, which is why most media that chose to actually cover Trump’s rally led their stories with it. But as noted by Josh Marshall for Talking Points Memo, there was something else in Trump’s speech as well, something generally ignored by the mainstream press: Trump is now exhorting his followers to actively commit voter fraud in upcoming elections, including, presumably, the 2022 and 2024 elections.

As noted by Marshall, Trump lead into this new tack by reiterating what his followers now generally accept as gospel: that his 2020 loss was due to some unspecified “cheating” by Democratic voters (the clear implication that those doing this cheating were of a darker shade of skin than his audience):

Trump then invented a story about his “aides” telling him that Republicans would never do such a thing. And with this phony premise in hand, he then exhorted his followers to abandon whatever moral reservations they might have about committing electoral fraud themselves:

As Marshall points out, the people who populate Trump rallies and social media follow Trump’s whims unreservedly, even if benumbed major media outlets tend to treat Trump’s rallies as exercises in hyperbole, eschewing coverage—as Marshall observes—to avoid “amplifying” his message.

His millions of followers don’t see it that way, however. Starved for a glimpse of guidance among Trump’s relatively truncated media appearances since his banishment from Twitter, they now hang on to his every word.

As Marshall observes:

Suffice it to say there has never been a political candidate in modern history—let alone a former president and potential future candidate—who has so directly told his base of supporters they should falsify votes, miscount votes, and stuff ballot boxes: In a word, cheat to get him elected. That’s a first. In September 2020 Trump had skated close to this line by urging his supporters to vote by mail and in person. When called out for advocating what in many states is a felony, Trump’s campaign issued a “clarifying” statement, much as Trump typically does when his criminal nature becomes too obvious to ignore. As reported at the time by James Oliphant for Reuters, that statement was (of course) ignored by his followers, while Trump continued to tweet the same thing to them uninterrupted. His statements were ultimately flagged on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

But this goes well beyond that. Trump likely isn’t expecting his individual base voters to have the wherewithal to commit widespread fraud sufficient to sway an election in his favor; rather, this is a signal to all those whom he and the GOP have placed in a position of supervising the counting (or miscounting) of ballots that committing such fraud is not only okay, it’s now an expectation.

As Masha Gessen observed in her now iconic 2016 essay Autocracy: Rules For Survival, rule No. 1 is paramount:

If Democrats and the independent media that continues to exist in this country should have learned one thing by now, it’s that there is no bottom with this individual; no low to which he will not stoop; no attack on the country’s institutions that he will not countenance. Nor, increasingly, is there any  such thing among those who have pledged him their support.

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