The question I get asked the most about Election Day comes in a few flavors. What should we expect from Trump? Will he try to steal the 2026 elections? How do we fight it? And every single time, my answer is the same: expect fuckery. Expect it, anticipate it, plan for it. Just know and understand that when it comes to Donald Trump, fuckery is as inevitable as a Saturday morning hangover after a Friday night of bad decisions.
So what do I mean by fuckery? It’s exactly what it sounds like. Cockamamie schemes. Tomfoolery. Bullshit. Shenanigans so spectacularly stupid they ought to come with a laugh track and a warning from the Surgeon General. Blatant, look-you-dead-in-the-eye lies delivered with the confidence of a man who thinks everybody else suffered a traumatic brain injury. Expect the whole buffet.
The lies will come in every size, big and small, and most will have the intellectual sophistication of a six-year-old with chocolate smeared across his face swearing he never touched the cake. They’ll make feeble attempts to dress the lies up as believable, but putting a necktie on bullshit doesn’t make it respectable. The president will offer a $1 million reward for voter fraud tips, payable only upon arrest and conviction, which is a bounty with more restrictions than a Spirit Airlines carry-on. He’ll tell crowds that if Jesus Christ came down and counted the votes, he’d win California. And the only people willing to entertain this foolishness are MAGAs who would believe Trump discovered gravity if he told them Isaac Newton was a Democrat.
Let’s take the alleged controversy in Alaska, starring two men named Dan Sullivan. One is the Republican incumbent senator, Dan S. Sullivan. The other is Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired teacher and registered Republican who qualified for the ballot after the Alaska Supreme Court rejected efforts to remove him. Two men. Same first name. Same last name. Different middle initials. A situation most Americans have successfully navigated since kindergarten. Trump looked at this perfectly ordinary occurrence and declared it “a scheme” and “total election fraud.” Then he announced that he personally ordered the Justice Department to sue Alaska to block certification of the Senate race. But here’s the punchline: only if his guy loses.
I’m sorry, but I’ve been trying to type this paragraph for ten minutes, and every time I get to the part about the lawsuit, I start laughing like somebody just told me the dumbest joke in human history. I have had to stop typing, compose myself, and remind myself that these are grown-ass men running the federal government. The Department of Justice actually filed a lawsuit seeking to block certification if Mary Peltola wins and votes for the other Sullivan could change the outcome.
If Senator Sullivan wins, congratulations, Alaskans! Your literacy has been restored! The confusion magically disappears, everybody remembers which Dan Sullivan is which, and democracy survives another day. But if Peltola wins, suddenly the entire state develops a reading disability. This administration has managed to invent a form of voter confusion that only affects Republicans when they lose. I would call it a medical breakthrough, but even Dr. Oz couldn’t sell that shit.
And the ballot already does the work. Senator Sullivan appears with his Republican affiliation and the word “incumbent” next to his name. The other Dan Sullivan appears with no party affiliation listed. Alaska also uses ranked-choice voting, which means someone worried about mixing up the two can rank both Sullivans. If the retired teacher is eliminated, a ballot ranking the senator next transfers to him.
The solution is printed right there on the ballot, but the Trump administration is acting as though Alaska hands voters two identical pieces of paper, turns off the lights, spins everybody around three times, and tells them to pick a Dan. These are people who think Americans can navigate a mortgage application, file their taxes, and operate a motor vehicle, but the moment they encounter two men named Sullivan, their brains turn into mashed potatoes.
Now, MAGA will point to the New York Times report about an alleged effort by people aligned with Peltola’s campaign to help recruit the second Sullivan, which Peltola denies. Fine. Even if every word of that holds up, it doesn’t establish that a single fraudulent vote was cast. Alaska’s courts had already allowed the retired teacher onto the ballot, and its election system provides ways to distinguish the candidates. The Justice Department still needed an actual legal basis to interfere with certification.
DOJ asked the court to order Alaska to “preserve and segregate” every ballot ranking the other Sullivan, and attorneys for the state told the judge that’s “not even possible.” Attorney General Todd Blanche, a man who somehow made it through law school without developing a working relationship with common sense, suggested voter confusion “could be obvious” from how people ranked the Sullivans.
How exactly, Todd? Are we going to interrogate the ballots? Hook them up to polygraph machines? Ask them to identify which Dan Sullivan they were thinking about when they entered the voting booth? Perhaps Blanche thinks ballots come with little thought bubbles explaining what voters meant. This asshole is the attorney general of the United States, and he’s proposing to solve a mystery involving secret ballots by pretending the government has psychic powers.
When Alaska and Peltola’s campaign moved to dismiss the case, DOJ amended its complaint and tried to render the dismissal motions moot while demanding essentially the same relief. Judge Sharon Gleason pointed out that DOJ waited until October 22, after voting had already begun and nearly four months after the Alaska Supreme Court allowed Daniel J. Sullivan onto the ballot.
On November 1, she dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the government lacked standing and had no workable way to investigate the ballots without violating voter secrecy. She was basically saying, “Listen, you dumbasses, I am a federal judge, not a magician. I cannot pull voters’ private thoughts out of a ballot box just because your president is having another one of his episodes.” And because losing a civil lawsuit wasn’t embarrassing enough, federal prosecutors also confirmed a criminal investigation, while Trump called for Peltola to be prosecuted.
Alaska’s own Republican-run state government told the court there was no reason to entertain this meritless lawsuit any longer. Lisa Murkowski said DOJ should never have filed it. Think about how ridiculous your argument has to be when the Republicans running the state are essentially asking the Republican president to stop embarrassing them.
I’ll give Trump and his people credit for one thing: they don’t even try to make their fuckery believable anymore. Most liars put some effort into their material. They’ll rehearse, establish a plausible timeline, invent a witness, maybe forge a document. These fools walk into federal court with a conspiracy theory that sounds like it was conceived during a gas leak at a Chuck E. Cheese.
I’ll even give the Alaska story credit for originality. I’ve been studying politics for decades, and I’ve never encountered a presidential administration arguing that two men sharing a name constitute an electoral emergency that only exists when a Democrat wins. That takes imagination. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of imagination you normally find in a toddler who has just eaten a crayon and is trying to explain why the dog did it.
You would think somebody in Trump’s orbit would walk into the Oval Office and say, “Mr. President, this one is so fucking stupid that even our usual bullshit artists won’t touch it.” But that would require somebody in the building to possess both a spine and a functioning survival instinct.
Instead, we got JD Vance. JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School, which is increasingly becoming the most embarrassing thing on Yale’s website. This man has a law degree from one of the most prestigious universities in America, yet he stood before reporters and argued that Alaskans might confuse two candidates named Dan Sullivan.
Asked whether this insulted voters perfectly capable of reading the word “incumbent,” Vance conceded that many people would recognize the difference before insisting that others might still be confused. Then he declared that putting somebody on the ballot to confuse voters is “the definition of electoral fraud” and accused Peltola of “trying to steal a Senate seat.” Coming from a man defending an administration that wanted to obstruct certification if its preferred candidate lost, that’s quite a performance.
And this is the same JD Vance who has complained that ranked-choice voting is too complicated. So according to the vice president, Alaskans cannot rank candidates, cannot distinguish between two middle initials, and cannot read the word “incumbent” without assistance from the federal government. I’m surprised he didn’t suggest putting pictures of the candidates on the ballot, followed by a congressional appropriation for crayons.
What the hell did Yale teach this man? Did he spend three years studying constitutional law, or was he auditing a course on how to defend stupid shit with a straight face? Between Blanche’s psychic ballots and Vance’s illiterate Alaskans, I honestly cannot tell whether I’m watching Black Mirror, The Twilight Zone, or an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head where both idiots somehow passed the bar exam.
I write about preference falsification often, and Alaska provides a fascinating illustration of the pressures that encourage it. Preference falsification occurs when people publicly endorse something they privately reject because telling the truth carries a greater social cost than repeating the lie.
Consider the professional incentives inside this administration. A president announces that two Dan Sullivans constitute an election conspiracy, the attorney general starts discussing how to decipher voters’ intentions, and the vice president goes before the cameras to explain why Alaska needs remedial reading classes. Nobody has to demonstrate that the theory makes sense. Their job is to defend it.
The moment somebody tells Trump, “Sir, this is the dumbest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard,” that person’s career prospects probably begin looking like a Blockbuster Video franchise. So the machinery of government grinds into action, federal lawyers file the paperwork, and Yale-educated officials stand before the country defending an argument that wouldn’t survive five minutes at a middle-school debate tournament. The emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, and his entire cabinet is fighting over who gets to compliment his necktie.
Trump has been going around claiming that if California held honest elections, Republicans would win. He told reporters this week that the state has 𝕏“very very corrupt elections” and that with an honest count, he “would have won it by a lot.”
Has this fool ever actually been to California outside of a fundraiser, a golf course, or a courtroom? Does he think Ronald Reagan is still governor? Somebody needs to explain to this man that the year is 2026, the Berlin Wall fell decades ago, and California hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. If Trump thinks he’s secretly winning California, somebody should check whether he’s been looking at the election returns from Wyoming.
I’ve lived in this state most of my life, and I’ve traveled it from the southernmost tip to the northernmost edge. California certainly has conservative areas. Even Los Angeles has a few conservative enclaves. But they are exactly that: enclaves. Walk into a Norms on a Friday night wearing a MAGA hat and see what happens. Nobody necessarily has to say anything. The looks alone will make you wonder whether somebody accidentally seated you in the middle of a disciplinary hearing.
If you’ve ever seen the ▶Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry David wears a MAGA hat to get out of social obligations, you understand Los Angeles perfectly. The show’s executive producer explained that the joke worked because MAGA hats are practically nonexistent in Los Angeles. Trump, naturally, tweeted the clip with the caption “TOUGH GUYS FOR TRUMP!” The man watched an entire comedy routine built around the idea that his supporters are socially radioactive and somehow concluded it was a campaign endorsement. And he wants us to trust his interpretation of election results.
But listen to these idiot MAGAs, and California is supposedly overflowing with conservatives just waiting for honest elections to liberate them from Democratic tyranny. Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento: all Republican strongholds in Trump’s imagination. Yes, California has red pockets. You’ll also encounter liberal phonies sweating microaggressions out of their pores and fiscal conservatives so obsessed with money they’d charge their own grandmothers interest on a birthday gift. Even plenty of those people don’t care for Trump.
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