Former President Donald J. Trump has baselessly and publicly cast doubt about the fairness of the 2024 election about once a day, on average, since he announced his candidacy for president, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

Though the tactic is familiar — Mr. Trump raised the specter of a “rigged” election in the 2016 and 2020 cycles, too — his attempts to undermine the 2024 contest are a significant escalation.

Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election had historic consequences. The so-called “Big Lie” — Mr. Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him — led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the United States Capitol and two of four criminal indictments against Mr. Trump, as well as his second impeachment.

But Mr. Trump had planted seeds of doubt among his followers long before Election Day, essentially setting up a no-lose future for himself: Either he would prevail, or the election would be rigged.

He has never given up that framing, which no evidence supports, even well after the end of his presidency. And as he seeks to return to the White House, the same claim has become the backbone of his campaign.

Long before announcing his candidacy, Mr. Trump and his supporters had been falsely claiming that President Biden was “weaponizing” the Justice Department to target him. But it took until March of last year for Mr. Trump to settle on a new accusation: that the multiple legal challenges related to Mr. Trump’s business and political activities constituted a “new way of cheating” in order to “interfere” in the 2024 election. He has made versions of that accusation more than 350 times.

“This is a rigged deal, just as the 2020 election was rigged, and we can’t let them get away with it,” Mr. Trump said on Nov. 18, 2022, three days after announcing his 2024 candidacy. His comments were in response to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s appointment of a special counsel to supervise the Justice Department’s criminal investigations related to the events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot and Mr. Trump’s decision to keep classified documents at his Florida resort.

By last summer, Mr. Trump had honed the language and made it a staple of his stump speech: “They rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.”

The Times has documented more than 500 campaign events, social media posts and interviews during the 2024 cycle in which Mr. Trump falsely accused Democrats or others of trying to “rig,” “cheat,” “steal” or otherwise “influence” the next election — or of having done so in 2020.

Mr. Trump has adapted the specifics of his accusations with each of the three election cycles. But in each case, his pattern of discourse has followed the same contours. He sows doubt about the legitimacy of the election, and then begins to capitalize on that doubt by alluding to not necessarily accepting the election results — unless, of course, he wins.

This rhetorical strategy — heads, I win; tails, you cheated — is a beloved one for Mr. Trump that predates even his time as a presidential candidate. He called the Emmy Awards “a con game” after his television show “The Apprentice” failed to win in 2004 and 2005. And before he officially became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, he began to float the possibility that the primary contest was, as he said, “rigged and boss controlled.”

By May of that year, Mr. Trump spoke plainly about why he had stashed the argument away. “You’ve been hearing me say it’s a rigged system,” he said, “but now I don’t say it anymore because I won.”

Late that summer, with his sights set on the November general election, Mr. Trump tested out a new line, contending that “the media” was “rigging” the election in favor of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. His assertions intensified in October after a recording surfaced of him speaking in vulgar terms about women.

“I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in 2016, three weeks before Election Day. And though he would end up winning the Electoral College and the presidency, his failure to secure the popular vote led him to form a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to “prove” that rampant voter fraud was to blame.

In December 2019, well into Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, the Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives impeached him, saying he used the levers of government to solicit election assistance from Ukraine in the form of investigations to discredit Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump subsequently said that Democrats were using the “impeachment hoax” to “interfere” in the election.

The Covid-19 pandemic gave him a new rallying cry, centered on election integrity: Mail-in ballots were “dangerous,” “fraught with fraud” and were being used to “steal” and “rig” the election, he said.

About six weeks before Election Day in 2020, Mr. Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. “We want to make sure that the election is honest, and I’m not sure that it can be,” Mr. Trump said.

This time, it was half a year before Election Day 2024 — and after more than a year of pushing the “election interference” line about the criminal charges against him and repeatedly warning that Democrats are “cheating” — that Mr. Trump again placed conditions on his acceptance of election results.

“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results,” he said in a May 1 interview with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

The controversial Equal Rights Amendment, which was on the ballot for the November elections in New York, has been tossed by a judge on procedural grounds.

The ruling is a victory for Republicans and opponents of the bill who say it was written too broadly and could trample parents’ rights when it comes to decisions like children receiving gender-affirming procedures.

The ERA was a rapid response by New York Democrats to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022. The amendment passed both houses of the New York legislature in a special session just one week after the Dobbs decision was rendered.

The amendment, which advocates say is meant to enshrine women’s right to abortion in the Empire State, was passed so quickly that a judge in Livingston County determined the legislation was fatally flawed due to a procedural mistake.

NY BALLOT INITIATIVE COULD BLOCK PARENTS FROM SAY IN CHILD’S TRANS SURGERY, CRITICS WARN IN FIERY CAMPAIGN

Bobbie Anne Cox, the attorney who sued the legislature to stop the referendum, said, “They put forth this amendment to the constitution. There was no open debate. There was no public hearings, there was nothing.”

“They referred it to the AG that day, but then they voted that same day. They didn’t even wait one day,” Cox continued.

The New York constitution requires that a proposed amendment must be presented to the attorney general to ensure that the proposal is not in conflict with other provisions of the constitution. The AG has 20 days to respond.

The New York State Capitol (AP Photo/Hans Pennink/File)

DOCTOR DEFENDS GIVING TRANSGENDER TREATMENTS TO 8- AND 10-YEAR-OLDS: ‘RESPECT KIDS AS INDIVIDUALS’

Supreme Court Justice Daniel J. Doyle declared the amendment “null and void” because the Democrats did not wait for the AG’s analysis.

“For them to violate the constitution and to want to do that in order to change the constitution is not acceptable, in fact it’s dangerous for the people, for the citizens,” Cox said.

Following the decision, Democrats have promised an appeal. Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement, “Our decades-long fight to protect equality and reproductive freedom will not be thrown off track by one extremist judge and I look forward to casting my ballot for the Equal Rights Amendment in November.”

The Coalition to Protect Kids – New York says an upcoming ballot proposal would ban parents from approving their child’s transgender surgery. (Coalition to Protect Kids – New York)

GENDER DYSPHORIA GROWING AMONG YOUNGER ADULTS AMID ‘INCREASING ACCEPTANCE,’ STUDY FINDS

Opponents of the amendment include former House Republican John Faso, who praised the decision to toss the referendum, calling the amendment “a cynical maneuver to try to boost [voter] turnout based on a false premise that abortion is at risk.”

Faso pointed to the legislature’s adoption of abortion rights legislation in 1970. He said the ERA goes far beyond guaranteeing a right to abortion.

“It would, for instance, give a minor a right to so-called gender-affirming care, puberty blockers even surgeries, without permission, without consent of their parents,” Faso said.

“It would also, for instance, say that biological males could compete on girls sports teams,” he added.

“Any decent lawyer will take one look at the Proposition One language and say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,” Greg Garvey, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect Kids – New York, a group “dedicated to defeating the Equal Rights Amendment,” said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

“This ballot initiative is written so broadly and so poorly that it could cause irreparable harm to children and families,” he continued. “This is no soft-sounding equal rights amendment, it’s nothing less than the parent replacement act.”

Democrat MaryJane Shimsky, a member of the New York State Assembly and advocate for the referendum, pushed back on opponents’ criticism, saying, “We need the ERA now precisely because of the extremists who would scapegoat children for political gain and the dangers their culture wars are creating in our communities.”

“New Yorkers know that we are stronger together and when we stand up for each other,” Shimsky continued. “Should the ERA proposition be restored to the ballot, I expect that it will pass with broad popular support.”

New York Senate leadership did not respond to Fox Digital’s request for comment.

He’s dined with a white supremacist. He’s invoked theories espoused by Nazis in their quest for racial purity.

His response to white supremacists marching in Charlottesville? There were “very fine people on both sides. “

So this week, when a video on former President Trump’s Truth Social account made reference to a “unified Reich,” his opponents were primed to pounce.

The message of Trump’s post was muddled, according to historians, but it used language most often associated with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said the video had been posted online without the former president’s approval by a junior staffer while Trump was in court. It went up while Trump was on his lunch break.

“This was not a campaign video, it was created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court,” Leavitt said in a statement to the Associated Press.

Still, Democrats and even some Republicans asserted that, whatever the intention or cause, the video showed that as Trump seeks to retake the White House, he often cites, invokes or is connected to far-right and Nazi language and imagery.

“If you understand fascism, you have a five-alarm bell going off in your head,” former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci said on MSNBC this week.

Scaramucci added that the people raising money for Trump’s campaign — mostly men, not women — “are doing it for superficial personal economic interest. They’re not understanding the full balance of what’s at stake here as it relates to the separation of power in the United States.”

Biden used the “unified Reich” video to repeat a theme he invokes frequently — the dire implications of a second Trump term.

“It is not the first time Trump has gone down this road,” Biden said at a fundraiser in Boston on Tuesday. “Folks, it can’t be any clearer. The threat Trump poses is greater the second time around than it was the first.”

In a video posted on social media Tuesday, Biden is seen watching the Truth Social post video reacting: “That’s Hitler’s language. That’s not America’s. He cares about holding on to power. I care about you.”

The video appeared on Trump’s social media Monday. The clip was ripped from another account and showed fake newspaper headlines saying “Trump Wins! and “What’s next for America?”

But looking closer, the video, which appears to have been made with an online template, includes headlines such as “INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED… DRIVEN BY THE CREATION OF A UNIFIED REICH.”

The text that appears in the video come from a Wikipedia entry on World War I. The unified Reich idea most likely references history that precedes the foundation of the Third Reich, when Hitler came to power in 1933. Still, the term “Reich,” which in German means realm or empire, has become closely associated with Hitler and the massacring of Jews and other minorities.

Trump critics note the Reich reference joins a long string of comments and associations that echo Nazi ideology.

In December, Trump said in a speech that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country,” which echoed Hitler’s repeated invocations that Jews were “poisoning” Aryan Germans. Trump, at the time, said he was unaware of the parallel and that he’d never read Hitler’s seminal text “Mein Kampf.”

During the 2020 campaign he seemed to endorse in speeches “racehorse theory” — the idea that selective breeding can improve a country’s performance. This idea was foundational to the Nazi notion of racial purity.

He also called his political opponents “vermin,” a term frequently employed by the Nazis against their opponents. A recent tell-all from journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser describes how Trump complained that American military officials weren’t “totally loyal” to him and how he reportedly asked his then-chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly: “Why can’t you be like the German generals?”

Kelly pointed out that Hitler’s generals tried to assassinate him, according to Glasser and Baker.

“Nazism, imperialism, and dictatorship all fly in the face of democracy,” said George Mason professor Tehama Lopez Bunyasi who has studied how race and identity intersect with politics.

“The American people should beware any candidate who does not rebuke these three outright.”

White nationalist Nick Fuentes holds a rally in 2020.

(Nicole Hester / Ann Arbor News)

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, president of the Center for Jewish History, said that Trump’s repeated flirtations with this sort of rhetoric and meetings with people like white nationalist Nick Fuentes condition people to look for the subtlest signs of antisemitism and parallels to Hitler. In 2022, Fuentes had dinner with Trump and rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye and who has repeatedly made antisemitic remarks in recent years.

Rosenfeld theorized that the Reich video could be “Gen Z staffers on the Trump team that like smuggling in ‘where’s Waldo’-style far-right icons into official Trump/GOP messaging” as hidden messages for their far-right peers.

It wouldn’t be the first time that happened. Last year, the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis fired a staffer who made a video of the governor that invoked Nazi ideology.

Then there are social media posts that come from people not directly connected to campaigns. During the 2020 presidential race, Facebook removed a pro-Trump post that included an upside-down red triangle, which was a symbol Nazis used to tar opponents. The New York Times reported that the anonymous social media user who purportedly made the video had posted several times that its meaning was clear and there was “not a secret hidden message.”

To Rosenfeld, such messaging has become all too common. “We’ve just been conditioned to see signs of fascism everywhere now,” Rosenfeld said, adding that there’s plenty of evidence in his mind that a second Trump term would be the “most right-wing and fanatical and corrupt in our lifetime.”

Thomas Weber, an expert on German history, pointed out that in modern Germany one far-right party has been cribbing wholesale from parts of the Nazi party manifesto.

“The whole bit about blood of the people: That is Nazi language pure and simple,” said Weber, a professor of history and international affairs at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. The Reich video, however, is “more complicated,” he said.

The video imagines that in a second Trump term, there would be low taxes, “no more wars” and the “economy booms.” These themes, Weber said, “don’t resonate with either the message of the Third Reich, nor of Imperial Germany.”

The video says that in a second Trump term, the border would be closed. That’s not a uniquely Nazi idea or Trump view, Weber said, and neither is pushing for the wholesale removal of people deemed not to belong in a country.

Ideas expressed in Hitler’s Germany are appearing, one way or another, in many countries.

“It’s not uniquely Trump who is inadvertently copying Nazi policy, but the same is true for the parties and political leaders across the Western world,” Weber said. “They do not appear to be clear how much they’re ultimately echoing the party platform of the Nazi party.”