ArcaMax

Pardon me if I repeat myself but, sometimes, I repeat myself.

I realized that as I was web surfing for a possible column on what would happen if President Donald Trump loses reelection in November but doesn’t want to leave.

A search quickly showed me that, in a way, I already wrote that column early last year. Call this Part Two.

That headline topped a column I wrote in May of last year after Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University in what were happier days for him, proposed that his presidential friend receive two additional years on his term to make up for the work time he allegedly lost in the Russia investigation.

The president thought that was a dandy idea, as he tweeted with glee. By contrast, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, warned in an interview that the party should “inoculate against that” by voting him out with numbers too big to resist.

After all, Trump himself had promised as early as his final presidential debate in 2016 to “totally accept” the election results before adding, after a pregnant pause, “... if I win.”

And he did. He lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, which holds the only votes that count in the presidential election under our Constitution.

But now the question has returned, along with lagging poll numbers for Trump in the battleground states, this time behind former Vice President Joe Biden.

And so has an old Trump target: allegations of voter fraud. Just as he blamed his popular vote loss on “millions” of illegal ghost voters, a charge that a bipartisan commission he appointed found to be a hoax, he now is alleging “fraud” in mail-in ballots.

Although Trump has argued that absentee ballots, like the ones he has used, are safer from fraud than the mail-in ballots that have been expanded during the coronavirus pandemic, fact-checkers have found both forms of mailed-in voting use the same verification and certification process.

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