You remember how we used to talk about the big lie, Trump's denial of the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and his attempt to change the outcome of that election in the states, in the courts, and ultimately with an attempted coup by his followers on January 6, 2021, the day on which the election was to be certified?

Well, the big lies back. But now it's forward-looking. It's a big lie 2.0, and it's already underway.

Trump and his henchmen are not waiting for next year's midterm elections to undermine them. He's already starting because

what Trump does so well is to so procedural chaos. And that's what we're seeing in this year's

elections, which are three days away. Last Friday, the Justice Department announced that it will

be sending so-called federal election monitors to California and New Jersey for election day, the sort of people

we send to other countries to monitor the safety and security of their elections.

In California, they're headed to seven counties ostensibly to oversee the voting on Proposition 50,

California's ballot initiative about redistricting, which is a direct challenge to Trump's own efforts to have

Republican-governed states undertake mid-decade redistricting ahead of the mid-term elections next year

to gain Republican seats in Congress. In New Jersey, the election monitors are going to

Passaic County, a community that's 43% Hispanic for a gubernatorial race.

Now, there are a few elections on Tuesday, so the choice of California and New Jersey,

states in which the elections are run and monitored by Democratic administrations, is telling.

Notice that no monitors are being sent to Virginia where Republicans control state government,

which suggests that this might not really be

about oversight of free and fair elections at all. If Trump and his foot soldiers once again

manufacture a fate crisis, claims of corrupt elections and rigged ballots and fraud everywhere,

he can use that manufactured crisis the way he did before as the justification to interfere on a much bigger scale

in more states and counties and districts that tend to vote for Democrats in 2026 and in

2008. In plain terms, this is a rehearsal. California Attorney General Rob Bonta immediately pushed back against the DOJ's

announcement saying his state will monitor the federal government monitors themselves. Governor Gavin

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