'Existential Threat to Our Democracy': Trump Openly Telegraphs Intent (Once Again) to Delegitimize 2020 Election Results

Critics including a national association of state attorneys-general sounded the alarm Thursday after President Donald Trump once again posted a baseless attack on the accuracy and integrity of absentee voting.

The president took to Twitter to share a post from True the Vote, a syntactically slurrious right-wing vote-monitoring group dedicated to stopping the mostly mythical threat of voter fraud. Ironically, the tweet chosen by the president actually calls for ensuring that U.S. military personnel are able to vote by mail.

However, Trump's retweet claims that the results of the 2020 presidential election "may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED" due to the "new and unprecedented massive amount of unsolicited ballots which will be sent to 'voters' or wherever this year." 

"Another election year disaster...," Trump tweeted. "Stop Ballot Madness!"

Twitter—not for the first time—responded by placing a misinformation warning on the president's tweet for posting what the social media company called a "potentially misleading statement" regarding the integrity of mail-in voting ahead of this November's general election. 

"We've added a label to this tweet for making a potentially misleading statement regarding the process of mail-in voting, and to offer more context for anyone who may see the tweet," the San Francisco-based social media giant explained. "This action is in line with our recently-updated Civic Integrity Policy."

While some critics poked fun at Trump's tweet, others sounded the alarm over what Christina Harvey, the managing director for the progressive digital grassroots group Stand Up America, called "an existential threat to our democracy."

"Donald Trump is telegraphing that he won't accept the results of the election if he loses and using the fig leaf of our safe, secure vote-by-mail system to do it," Harvey said in response to the president's tweet. "This sentiment represents an existential threat to our democracy and is the exact reason we are mobilizing to vote him out of office and peacefully take to the streets to defend the valid results of this election if necessary."

"The greatest threat to our election integrity lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, co-chairs of the Democratic Attorney Generals Association (DADA), said in an email to Common Dreams. "Trump's lies, corruption, and disrespect for voters is simply un-American."

This isn't the first time Trump's tweets have been hit with warnings. In recent months, his posts have been flagged for false claims about absentee voting, encouraging felonious voter fraud, and for glorifying violence.