Trump's efforts to spin any loss in a general election as a win that had been stolen from him

had begun long before those midnight drops in Milwaukee and Atlanta. For as much as the

establishment media would cast election denial as something entirely alien to the American

tradition, it really was anything but. Even if you ignore the obvious precedents, like McCain's warning that

Acorn would steal the 2008 elections or the entirety of the Bertha movement, you still

have countless examples of the right-crying fraud when it didn't get its way, and some of the

times when it did get its way. Even after Trump won and became president in 2016, he still spent a significant amount of time

after the election, claiming that illegal immigrants had cost him the popular vote and a win in

the state of New Hampshire.

If you want to go really far back, you could point to the widespread belief that the

Kennedy's rigged the 1960 election as having first laid the groundwork

for this, or how Gerald Ford diehards and Lyndon fucking LaRoche alleged that Jimmy Carter

had stolen the presidency in 1976. The point here is that Trump's effort to remain in power

indefinitely didn't come out of nowhere. Even the phrase stop the steal itself wasn't new.

Roger Stone had actually formed a group with that exact same name back in 2016, in anticipation

of Hillary's seemingly impending victory. And for as much as Trump's efforts to steal his second

term were cast as the doing of a rag-tag cast of unknown sycophants.

Many of those who did the heaviest lifting for this effort had been right-wing power players

for decades.

Two days after the election was called for Biden, Jimmy Thomas, wife of Clarence himself,

sent emails to dozens of Arizona state legislators demanding that they overturn the results in

the state and give its 11 electors to Trump. Samuel Alito's wife hung a flag at his home in

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