Last week, Donald Trump made an official address to the nation, instead of carrying out the usual press conference or making impromptu declarations. This quite solemn occasion was used to discuss the vulnerabilities of the US voting system. He is not new to this subject. Already at the time of his first campaign in 2016 he said the system was “rigged”, which would have been his excuse to justify his defeat, had Hillary Clinton won. Since he won that election, someone should have reminded him that, by his logic, he must have won “because” the system was rigged, rather than in spite of the fact that it was rigged.

When Trump lost the 2020 presidential race against Joe Biden, he reiterated his usual refrain, that the election was stolen, without providing any credible evidence. He tried all possible means of preventing that election from being certified. The assault on Capitol Hill on January 6th, 2021 occurred exactly on the day the Senate, led by Vice President Mike Pence, was summoned to certify that vote.

This is how Trump approaches the issue: loyal to the mantra taught by his early mentor Roy Cohn, Trump never admits defeat. A recent episode is extremely telling. First, he did “rig” the system of the World Cup, which the US is hosting together with Canada and Mexico, by calling FIFA President Infantino to obtain a reinstatement of Team USA’s best player, who had received a red card in the preceding match, so that he could play the subsequent match against Belgium. Shockingly, Infantino accepted. Then, when asked how he would react to the possible results of the match, Trump said: “if the USA team wins, I’ll say it’s the strongest team ever; if it loses, I will say that the match was rigged”. Classic Trump.

This story is helpful to interpreting the recent address by Trump on the vulnerability of the voting system in the US. He said that he has declassified lots of documents showing that the 2020 election was compromised by Chinese interference. He said that China stole millions of electoral data of US citizens, which are in reality public and are regularly acquired by companies for commercial purposes. He cited many other documents from the intelligence community, which actually reach the opposite conclusion. One of the documents posted on the White House website was very specific on this issue: “We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.”

Trump said he wants to fix this broken system, but in reality he has spent the last two years dismantling the election protections built up over time. As the New York Times reports, “the F.B.I.’s task force on foreign influence was shut down, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sharply cut back a task force that warned against foreign meddling and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been gutted. And Mr. Trump has appointed an heir to a housing fortune with no relevant experience as the interim director of national intelligence.”

The immediate action, in his view, is for Congress to approve the SAVE Act, which would introduce a number of provisions that would discourage voting by mail (traditionally preferred by the Democratic electorate) and introduce restrictions that would penalise Democrat- leaning women; for example, the need to show a birth certificate with the name given at birth, rather than that after marriage.

So Trump is clearly attempting all possible routes to prevent a defeat in November, which all polls show to be the most likely scenario. The strategy is threefold.

First, before the election, Trump is attempting all tactics not to lose too many votes This includes extensive jerrymandering and redistricting, restrictions to vote for social groups more likely to vote Democrat, etc.

Second, on the day of the vote: the aim is to create as many cases as possible of conflict at the polling station, to turn down voters from constituencies that tend to be more hostile to him (women, ethnic minorities, etc.), and having an excuse to say that the vote was irregular.

Third, after the vote: if all exit polls show a defeat by the Republicans at the House and possibly even the Senate, Trump will try as much as he can to prevent the vote from being certified, potentially with the help of Vice President JD Vance. The extremely high fences put outside the White House, that prevent the access to Lafayette Square and the perimeter of the White House, are just one example of the physical obstacles that Trump may utilise to prevent angry voters from getting to him.

What could be the consequences of all this? Robert Kagan, neo-con Republican, has always been adamant about the dangers posed by President Trump. Even before the 2024 presidential election, he wrote an article titled “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” After last week’s address to the nation, he is even more convinced about his views. He believes that around the mid-term election a coup d’etat is likely to happen, and he has started to consider the “GOP as the Party of Dictatorship.”

He says he can imagine a situation in which the speaker of the House Mike Johnson may refuse to certify the result and install a newly elected Congress, citing purported irregularities in the voting system and foreign interference. At that point the Administration could utilise the federal police to sequester the ballots, to prevent Americans from knowing who won the elections. One can easily imagine how a new civil war may erupt and a dictatorship installed. As we wrote extensively before the 2024 presidential race, a victory by Donald Trump would represent the greatest challenge to the existence of US liberal-democracy, and these events seems to confirm this view.