Trump's false claims are a smokescreen for something far more underhanded

On Tuesday, Larry Kudlow, the Fox personality and former Trump advisor, was on the TV.

You will be shocked to learn he lied.

“I vote in the state of Connecticut. You don’t need a photo ID. You could vote if you just show them a credit card or a debit card, which anybody can get their hands on. I think it’s a scam."

The context was “election integrity” and voter-ID laws. At the time, the House was debating a bill that would nationalize elections to an alarming degree. (The so-called SAVE America Act passed the following day.) Kudlow’s “commentary” primed Donald Trump to respond.

“Connecticut is an extremely corrupt voting place,” he said. “That's why a guy like [Richard] Blumenthal can keep getting elected. He admitted he cheated on the war. I went to Vietnam for a couple of days and I spent two more days than he did there. He was never there."

All but one thing above, which I will get to, is a lie.

I also live in Connecticut. I vote in Connecticut. You cannot walk into a polling station, present a credit card and vote. I don’t know if that would be illegal. I do know it would fail.

You are permitted to vote without photo-ID, but the documents you are required to produce are the same ones you are required to produce to get a Connecticut drivers license.

In other words, proof of residency.

According to today’s New Haven Register, those documents include:

But Connecticut’s election laws don’t stop there.

Even if you have photo-ID, or produce the same documents required to get photo-ID, you still have to go through an additional process. Volunteer poll workers find your name and address on a list of voters. That list is maintained by Republican and Democratic registrars. It is created via voter registration, a process that happens in advance of Election Day.

So there are at least two stages, registration and verification.

Here’s Connecticut’s top elections official with the rest of the details:

Here's an example of “when an issue is identified”: In 2023, the state's media was abuzz with news of an attempt to stuff mail-in vote boxes in favor of Bridgeport’s Democratic mayor, Joe Ganim. The perpetrators, all Democrats, were found, prosecuted and convicted. The state’s legislature, which is dominated by Democrats, tightened rules to prevent future abuse.

It’s safe to presume that Larry Kudlow knows the same things I know given that we both live and vote in the state of Connecticut. I think it’s therefore reasonable to conclude not only that he’s lying, but that he knows he’s lying. And I think it's important to say that plainly.

A lot of time is put into fact-checking in a valiant effort to defend the truth, but the lies themselves are worth paying attention to, because without them, the true position of the GOP would be indefensible. Achieving their goals would be impossible without deceit.

The liars know election fraud is rare. States and localities have multi-stage verification processes. They know that rarity is due to state laws holding criminals accountable. And liars know Americans prefer tradition. We prefer states and localities be in charge of elections.

What do the liars really want?

To stop the Democrats from winning.

To do that, the president and his allies need to put in place a system with rules that suppress voters who favor Democrats. To do that, they need to take away voting authority from localities and states. That’s the point of the SAVE America Act. (It is also the point of a lawsuit against Connecticut and other blue states to force them to turn over voter rolls.) If successful, the effort would give the GOP a means of voiding Democratic victories.

That’s what they want, but they can’t say that. So they lie.

They ask “questions” about “election integrity,” as if manifesting the will of the American people were their highest value. They talk about “election security” as if threats by Russian or Chinese aggressors were of actual concern. They do this not to raise awareness of problems, or to search for good-faith solutions, but to sabotage trust in free and fair elections.

And they smear.

That brings me to Richard Blumenthal.

Before he ran for the Senate in 2010, Blumenthal was Connecticut’s attorney general for 20 years. He was popular. Everyone knew running for the Senate was a foregone conclusion.

In the run up to Election Day that year, the Times ran a story documenting a few times when Blumenthal seemed to suggest he served “in” Vietnam. He didn’t. He served stateside for six years in the US Marine Corps Reserve during the Vietnam War. But most Nutmeggers, as we sometimes call ourselves, were already familiar with his biography. It was widely understood what Dick Blumenthal meant to say. The allegations of “stolen valor” fell flat and he won.

Donald Trump often comes back to this moment when Blumenthal is in the headlines criticizing him. This time, however, the president didn’t just smear Blumenthal. He smeared the whole state. After all, only an “extremely corrupt voting place” like Connecticut would keep electing a senator who “admitted he cheated on the war. … He was never there."

That’s the only true thing Donald Trump said: Blumenthal wasn’t there. Otherwise, his every word was a lie designed to project onto enemies his own criminal intent in the belief they will chose to protect themselves and the truth rather than go on the offensive against him.

Liars expect us to defend the truth.

They don’t expect us to attack them for lying.

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