Right-wing media figures are displaying irrational levels of confidence in Donald Trump’s chances of winning the presidential election. While poll aggregators and models suggest the race is a toss-up, MAGA pundits are deluging their supporters with the message that Trump’s victory is inevitable.

Whether or not this is a deliberate strategy, the result is that right-wing audiences — which generally trust information only when it comes from right-wing sources — are not being prepared for the possibility of Trump’s defeat. That makes it more likely that they will disbelieve such an outcome and rally to a Trumpian effort to overturn it.

When the right-wing media ecosystem similarly presented Trump as an overwhelming favorite in the waning days of his 2020 campaign against Biden, I warned that they were laying the groundwork for a potential violent coup attempt by the then-president:

Fox’s effort is a necessary -- if not sufficient -- step toward enacting Trump’s openly touted plan to try to steal the election (if it is close enough to do so) by preventing the counting of ballots legally cast for Biden. And even if the network fails to keep Trump in the White House, its reckless disinformation could raise tensions to feverish heights, potentially leading to political violence.

Indeed, Trump declared victory on election night and, backed by the right-wing propaganda machine, used pretextual claims of voter fraud to try to overturn Biden’s victory, culminating with the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Four years later, the same scenario is playing out again.

Right-wing media aren't acknowledging the possibility of defeat

Polls currently show a tight race for president that could go either way. “In an election where the seven battleground states are all polling within a percentage point or two, 50-50 is the only responsible forecast,” Nate Silver wrote in an October 23 op-ed. “Since the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, that is more or less exactly where my model has had it.”

But it often seems that the U.S. commentariat has sorted itself such that the nation’s most hubristic optimists are all supporting the GOP while its most anxious pessimists are loyal Democrats. The result is that right-wing pundits spend every election cycle predicting victory, while left-wing pundits worry over the prospect of defeat. This election is no different.

In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, right-wing media figures embraced poll trutherism and told their audiences that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was going to defeat then-President Barack Obama in a “landslide.” The right was so primed for victory that Fox political analyst Karl Rove, who had predicted a sizable Romney win, ended up arguing with his own network’s decision desk over the state of the race as results rolled in on election night showing Obama had been reelected.

Trump epitomizes the right’s irrational confidence — but with the added twist that only fraud could explain any Republican defeat.

“We should have a revolution in this country!" he tweeted on election night 2012, calling the results “a total sham and a travesty.”

After eking out a narrow electoral vote victory in 2016, he falsely claimed that he had lost the popular vote only due to “millions of people who voted illegally.” And he asserts to this day that he won the 2020 election but it was robbed from him by fraud, a lie that has permeated his party.

The 2022 midterms brought more predictions of an impending “red wave” of Republican victories. Tucker Carlson, for example, told Fox viewers in the leadup to Election Day that only fraud could explain Democratic victories in races like the Pennsylvania campaign for U.S. Senate and the Arizona gubernatorial race.

Following the GOP’s lackluster showing that year, Carlson seemed chastened.

“Republicans swore they were going to sweep a red tsunami,” he said. “That's what they told us and we, to be honest, cautiously believed them, but they did not sweep, not even close to sweeping,” he complained. “How could there not be a massive Republican win nationally, wins everywhere? Well, there weren’t. … Joe Biden was not punished.”

But either Carlson didn’t actually learn anything from that experience, or he’s decided that projecting overweening confidence is strategically apt. The close Trump adviser and popular right-wing podcaster is again suggesting that the former president’s supporters shouldn’t accept the results if Trump loses.

“I think Donald Trump’s going to win, which is amazing,” he said at a pro-Trump rally in Georgia on Wednesday. “Donald Trump's victory will be a triumph of the human spirit. It will be a triumph of Americans over the machine that seeks to oppress them. It will be a middle finger wagging in the face of the worst people in the English-speaking world."

Carlson analogized a Trump victory to a scenario in which “Dad comes home” and tells a “hormone-addled” teenage daughter (standing in for American liberals), “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now. … It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.”

Later in the speech, he returned to the theme of Trump’s inevitable victory.

“I think Donald Trump’s going to win,” he said. "I think the vibe is so strong right now, I don’t think they can get away with pretending something else happened. I don’t think we can have another 2020 at this point. I just don’t.”

Carlson went on to suggest that “no matter what they pull,” “I don’t think they can get away with” saying that Vice President Kamala Harris won the election.

“I don’t think people are going to sit back and take it,” he added. “They need to lose, and at the end of all of that when they tell you they’ve won, no. You can look them straight in the face and say, ‘I’m sorry — dad’s home,’” he concluded.

Carlson isn’t alone in dismissing the possibility that Trump could still lose the election. Such sentiments are currently everywhere within the right-wing ecosystem.

Trump himself is reportedly “uncharacteristically buoyant, almost cavalier, convinced that victory is his,” and, bolstered by waves of favorable polls from GOP-linked firms, that belief is trickling down.

Loyal Trumpers are telling Fox’s audience that Trump’s victory is inevitable.

Host Jesse Watters has been predicting for months that Trump “is going to win” in a “landslide” and that evidence suggesting otherwise comes from “fake polls — Trump’s going to kill her.” His colleague Greg Gutfeld says, “The race is over, but the integrity of the election is still in question,” and “Donald Trump’s got this.” Contributor Joe Concha is also predicting a Trump “landslide,” telling viewers: “He wins this quite easily. Save the tape. Play it back if I'm wrong. This is how it's going to end.”

Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk likewise says his viewers should “expect desperation out of the Democrats right now” because Trump’s “early voting numbers are great, as his odds in the betting markets are ascendant.”

MAGA influencers are dubiously claiming that Harris’ messaging suggests her internal polling must be “very alarming” — or even making up sources that they claim have access to those dire figures.

Even right-wingers who are occasionally skeptical of the former president are saying he has the election in the bag.

“I really did think for a good portion of the year that I’d be spending the last month of this election slowly building my audience of readers and listeners to a place where they could accept Trump's loss without immediately descending into stolen election conspiracy theories,” Erick Erickson wrote on Wednesday. “Instead, I find myself having to rein myself in from explicitly saying he has won thirteen days before the election. This is rather wild.”

As Erickson’s missive makes clear, there are few if any voices on the right preparing their audience for the possibility of Trump’s defeat.

All this has happened before

By way of preparing my own audience: It is possible none of this will ultimately matter. With numerous swing states polling within the margin of error, and the chance of a systemic poll error in play, Trump could very well win legitimately in November.

But if the election returns show that Harris has triumphed, Trump has a backup plan ready to go: He can attempt to subvert the election, as he did in 2020.

While elements of that plan could be different, the broad strokes of declaring victory, presenting himself as the victim of election fraud, filing pretextual lawsuits, and ultimately leaning on Republican officials at the local, state, and federal levels to hand him the presidency remain unchanged.

This strategy rests on Trump being able to convince the Republican base that he won the election. In 2020, he had the support of a vast right-wing media ecosystem that, with few exceptions, had already prepped its audience to disbelieve the results of the election if Trump won. The result was a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol that threatened American democracy.

Since then, the right has purged media figures and Republican politicians who had stood in the way of the plot. And now, in 2024, the same players are again laying the groundwork for a Trumpian subversion effort.

In a few weeks, the country could once more be positioned on the edge of the abyss.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters