It’s 2020 all over again. GOP escalates claims of election fraud with no receipts.

A rightwing Republican National Convention sponsor and author of Project 2025 is accusing President Joe Biden of planning a coup. There is a “0% chance of a free and fair election,” according to Mike Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation.

The effort was designed to muddy the waters over the threat to the 2024 election posed by Donald Trump, who has repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the election results and tried to overturn the 2020 vote. Instead, the Heritage Foundation, which is also behind the extreme Project 2025, wanted to suggest that it was Joe Biden who could try to overturn the result of the election, echoing the ex-president’s repeated claims that it is actually Biden who is the threat to democracy.

According to The Washington Post:

[The Heritage Foundation] stated as a given that the Biden administration was already engaged in a sweeping conspiracy to use multiple forms of federal power to influence the presidential election. It did not supply any evidence.

In 2020, then president Donald Trump began attempts to discredit election results long before November. In 2024, he has already repeatedly claimed that “he can only lose through cheating.”

Heather Cox Richardson provides additional context:

There is no indication that Biden, who has repeatedly said he will accept the election results, will try to launch a coup against the United States government. In contrast, Trump, who has refused to say he will accept the election result unless he agrees with it, has already done exactly what Heritage is trying to pin on Biden: Trump tried to stay in office against the will of the voters in 2021. 

Trump is currently under criminal indictment for that attempt, although the Supreme Court’s eye-popping July 1 decision in Trump v. U.S. declaring that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties” means Trump can challenge those indictments.

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