How Trump could create chaos in Alaska’s midterm election
- Rich Moniak
- 19 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Rich Moniak
U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, called a social media post shared by President Donald Trump last week “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House." Sen. Dan Sullivan called it “offensive.” Trump took the post down but wouldn’t apologize because he “didn’t make a mistake.”
I don’t need to elaborate on the racist nature of the post. It already elicited enough justifiable outrage.
Instead, I’m going to focus on the minute-long video attached to it. Then show how it fits a deviant pattern of deliberately undermining public confidence in our elections. And that should serve as a warning about what might happen in Alaska if Sullivan and/or Rep. Nick Begich III lose to Democrats in November.
“I liked the beginning,” Trump said. “It was about fraudulent elections, and anytime I see that stuff, and when it's credible, you put it up.”
The video was an excerpt from a documentary produced by My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell. In it, retired U.S. Army Colonel Phil Waldron describes evidence supposedly proving that Dominion Voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden in 2020.
In much of Trump’s MAGA universe, anything purporting to have proof the election was stolen is credible. And Trump has said anybody who thinks it wasn’t stolen must be “a very stupid person.”
In reality, Lindell, Waldron and conspiracies about Dominion voting machines have all been thoroughly discredited.
A few weeks earlier, Trump embarrassed America by telling world and business leaders in Davos the 2020 election was rigged. “Everybody now knows that,” he said. “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”
He might have been referring to election officials in Fulton County, Georgia.
Remember when he pleaded with the Georgia Secretary of State “to find 11,780 votes” which he needed to win the state. In that infamous phone call, Trump said “in Fulton County you’ll find at least a couple of hundred thousand” ballots with forged signatures.
The day before sharing the Lindell video, Trump posted a conspiracy theory even crazier than the one about Dominion. It was about “Italian officials” using “military satellites to help hack U.S. voting machines, flipping votes from Trump to Biden.” China “coordinated the whole operation” while the “CIA oversaw it” and the “FBI covered it up.”
The next day NBC’s Tom Llamas asked Trump if he really believed it.
“No, no, no. no,” Trump replied, but added that he still sometimes reposts garbage like that anyway.
Recall the months before the 2020 election how he prepared Republican voters to expect Democrats to engage in widespread voter fraud. After he lost, he made countless false claims that it actually happened. And despite repeatedly saying he had the evidence to back it up, he’s never produced anything remotely credible.
Now, with the midterms approaching, he’s employing the same flood-the-zone-with-crap tactics to prepare voters not to accept the results if Republicans lose one or both houses of Congress.
If Democrats beat Sullivan and/or Begich, their margin of victory will likely be very small. We should expect a sizeable percentage of Alaskan Republicans to suggest the outcome was tainted by the state’s ranked choice voting system (RCV).
That seed has already been planted by people like Rep. Kevin McCabe. He thinks RCV’s algorithms are “rigged” to erase “conservative voices.”
Trump is primed to target RCV too.
“You never know who won in ranked choice. You could be in third place, and they announce that you won the election,” he said at an Anchorage rally four years ago. “It's a total rigged deal. Just like a lot of other things in this country.”
Unlike 2020, this time his administration is stocked with absolute loyalists. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel approved the seizure of Fulton County’s election records. And despite the complete lack of credible evidence, Bondi has overseen attempts to prosecute Trump’s political enemies.
And unlike Republican officials in Georgia who refused to participate in Trump’s con game, we can expect Gov. Mike Dunleavy to order his attorney general to cooperate with Patel and Bondi in any investigation Trump deems necessary.
If they do lose, Sullivan and Begich could prevent the resulting chaos by simply conceding. But given their unabashed fealty to Trump, and their refusal to flat-out say he lost in 2020, that’s not an insurance policy that gives me any sense of comfort.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
