Georgia on His Mind: The Would-Be Election Rigger Revs It Back Up

Jeff Robbins on Feb 10, 2026

For five years, President Donald Trump has peddled the false, justly ridiculed claim that the 2020 election that he lost to former President Joe Biden was stolen from him. It is a false claim made even more notable, if possible, by the federal indictment issued by a grand jury finding probable cause to conclude that the only person who person to attempt to steal the 2020 election was ... Donald Trump. There's always debate about whether Trump makes these claims because he's untethered or because he's a con artist, but there's absolutely no reason to think the two are mutually exclusive.

Some 60 separate courts rejected Trump's claim that the 2020 results were marred by irregularity, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that a president of sound mind who found himself so thoroughly discredited would drop it and concentrate, say, on urging U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents not to execute American citizens for protesting immigration policies. Trump's fraudulent claims of fraud earned him a federal indictment, among other things, for conspiracy to defraud the United States.

The unfortunate lawyers who advanced those claims on his behalf have found themselves admonished, fined, disbarred or worse. Crash-and-Burn Poster Child Rudy Giuliani was tagged with a $148 million defamation judgment for falsely claiming that Georgia election workers engaged in wrongdoing. Trump media mouthpiece Fox News had to pay a voting systems company over $785 million for promoting Trump's phony nonsense. Newsmax, which makes Fox look like Walter Cronkite, got off light: it only had to pay that company $67 million for doing the same.

But with polls showing Trump's approval rating in the 30s and Democrats well-positioned to erase Republicans' razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives in the midterms, the Convicted Criminal-in-Chief has dusted off the playbook and is making moves to meddle with the elections to tilt things in his favor.

Georgia has occupied a special place in the president's psyche, and not in a good way. It was the object of Trump's openly felonious phone call after Georgians voted for Biden over Trump by some 11,000 votes in 2020, handing Biden the state's 16 electoral votes. Toggling between fraudulent schemes to block certification of the electoral votes, orchestrate illegal slates of electors and pressure the Justice Department into making false accusations of voter fraud, Trump placed his famous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, demanding that he "find" enough phony votes to throw the election to him. "So look," the President of the United States said, "All I want to do is find 11,870 votes. There's nothing wrong with saying that, you know, uh, that you've recalculated."

Trump was also indicted by a Fulton County, Ga. grand jury for multiple acts of election fraud, and it has remained rather unclear what defense he would have had to these charges. But good fortune visited Trump in the form of a tawdry affair between the District Attorney and the lead prosecutor on the case, lengthy delays and, ultimately, Trump's victory in 2024, which effectively doomed the case.

But for Trump, the Georgia indictment is, as they say, gone but not forgotten. Last week, the FBI that Trump controls seized 700 boxes of ballots, voter rolls and vote tabulation records from Fulton County's election office. The purported basis for the seizure is secret, as the FBI affidavit justifying it is under seal. In other words, even the pretext for the seizure is a mystery; the only election fraud that anyone knows of relating to the 2020 Georgia election is that which Trump attempted, only to be rebuffed by a Republican Secretary of State. "Every audit, every recount, every court ruling has confirmed what the people of Fulton County already know," noted the head of Fulton County's Board of Commissioners last week. "Our elections were fair and accurate, and every legal vote was counted."

Meanwhile, Trump has called for "nationalizing" the election, transferring states' administration of voting procedures -- like mail-in voting -- to such good faith federal actors as the FBI (Kash Patel), the Director of National Intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard) and the Department of Homeland Security (Kristi Noem).

We still wait for millions of Americans to awake from slumber.

Any decade now.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.