As Election Day crept closer, Romney saw signs of yet another crisis on the horizon. Trump—who trailed significantly in the polls—was making it clear that he wouldn’t go quietly. In August, the president claimed the only way he would lose was if the election was “rigged.” Since then, he’d begun to weave dark rumors of election fraud into his speeches. In a video recruiting volunteers to join the campaign’s “election-security operation,” his son, Don Jr., asserted that Democrats were planning “to add millions of fraudulent ballots” to the vote: “The radical left are laying the groundwork to steal this election from my father.… We need you to help us watch them.”
By now, there were few depths to which Trump could sink that would surprise Romney. But he was disturbed by how widely the president’s rigged-election narrative was being adopted by his supporters. It didn’t take a constitutional scholar to see the threat this posed to democracy.
“If you don’t believe in the ballot, then you do believe that someone should be able to assert power without the ballot,” Romney would later remember thinking. “And once that happens, you’re now in an authoritarian regime.”
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