#Trump’s ‘fraud’ charges run real risk of costing GOP Senate runoffs in Georgia

‘If voters believe the game is rigged, why should they bother playing?’

President Trump and his supporters have reason to be sore about how they’ve been treated. But their anger about the hypocrisy of their opponents and hard feelings about the way Joe Biden won shouldn’t encourage them to give up.

That’s the danger of promoting the belief that the 2020 election was “fixed”: It could mean letting Democrats win the two all-important Georgia Senate runoff races, giving the left undivided control.

There were plenty of irregularities, and legitimate concerns about mail-in ballots are worthy of investigation. But the conspiracy theories being floated about software flipping millions of votes from Trump to Biden could be the best thing that ever happened to the Democrats: Republicans concluding their votes don’t matter.

A lot of Republicans sound like sore losers now. But you could have said the same thing about Democrats after Trump won in 2016. Democrats not only refused to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 win, they spent the four years that followed trying to discredit the ­results by falsely claiming it was the product of Russian intervention. They relentlessly promoted a “collusion” theory that turned out to be utter bunk.

The media didn’t even bother to pretend to be ­fair or objective in their coverage of the administration — or in their willingness to protect Biden from scrutiny at ­every step. And liberal social-media oligarchs censored those, like reporters for this paper, who investigated Dem scandals.

All this means the 2020 election wasn’t an entirely fair fight. Still, the novel-coronavirus pandemic and general Trump fatigue clearly cost the president the election. Pretending that he really “won” isn’t going to help anyone, least of all the GOP.

Many of the president’s followers are drawing dark lessons from his accusations. If you think — as Trump keeps telling us — that elections are rigged, why bother voting?

That’s the conclusion some on the right are coming to about the Georgia Senate runoffs. Some Trump voters intend to boycott the runoffs. They’re accusing the two GOP candidates — Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue — of being insufficiently zealous in supporting efforts to overturn the election results. ‘

This is in spite of the fact that they were pressured into calling for the resignation of Georgia’s Trump-supporting Republican secretary of state, who oversaw the voting and who is wrongly accused of being complicit in Biden allegedly stealing the state.

That’s one of the problems with conspiracies. Anyone who doesn’t accept all of the theory’s assumptions is regarded as part of the conspiracy. If some GOP voters now think this way, the blame ­belongs to Trump, because he has taught his followers to believe that the only way he could lose would be by massive fraud.

The consequences of this craziness are potentially enormous. If Loeffler and Perdue are defeated, Democrats will win control of the Senate. Then there will be nothing to stop them from ending the filibuster, allowing Biden to pack the Supreme Court, passing a dangerously radical Green New Deal — and granting statehood to the District of Columbia and maybe even Puerto Rico, thus creating potentially four more Democratic senators.

Perhaps some people think Trump losing is the end of the world. But for the rest of us — who will have to live in an America made unrecognizable by legislation backed by the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her socialist Squad — there is something still worth a fight.

Given that the two Democrats running in Georgia are left-wingers, it would be a scandal if they skate to victory because Republicans don’t turn out.

The president has said he will campaign for Loeffler and Perdue, but he has to do more than just show up in Georgia. He may spend the rest of his life claiming he was cheated, but he has to make it clear to his fans that their votes do matter — something that was made ­obvious by the many down-ballot victories scored by the GOP.

Whether or not Trump is serious about running again in 2024, he owes it to the people who voted for him — and the country — to do everything in his power to end the conspiracy mongering and stop a Democratic takeover of the Senate.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org.

Twitter: @JonathanS_Tobin