Sit on it ...

Like a hulking monster in a cheesy horror movie of the late 50's, Trump looms over 11/3/2020 like a disheveled Frankenstein, ready to do whatever it takes to stay in office in order to not go to jail, courtesy the Southern District of New York.

In June, President Trump sat in the Oval Office for one of his periodic interviews-turned-airing-of-grievances. When the conversation turned to the 2020 election, Trump singled out what he called the “biggest risk” to his bid for a second term. It was not the mounting death toll from COVID-19, or further economic damage inflicted by the pandemic, or anything else a reality-dwelling president might fret about.

“My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits,” Trump told the Politico reporter he’d invited. He was referring to the series of lawsuits filed by his campaign and the Republican National Committee that fight the expansion of mail-in voting and seek to limit access to the ballot box in November. “We have many lawsuits going all over,” he said. “And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think — I think it puts the election at risk.”

It gets "better."

But Trump defied the prewritten obituaries in 2016, and he could do it again this year. In recent months, a central theme of his re-election strategy has come into clear, unmistakable focus: Trump and his Republican enablers are putting voter suppression front and center — fear-mongering about voting by mail, escalating their Election Day poll watching and so-called ballot-security operations, and blocking funding to prepare the country for a pandemic-era election. “The president views vote-by-mail as a threat to his election,” a lawyer for the Trump campaign recently told 60 Minutes. Attorney General William Barr told Fox News that vote-by-mail  “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud.” And Trump blasted out in a May tweet that “MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE. IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY. WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION.”

“They’re shouting the quiet part out loud,” Marc Elias, one of the Democratic Party’s top election lawyers, tells Rolling Stone. “They’re not whispering it. They’re shouting it.”

The camel's nose is in the tent yet again.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY VICTOR JUHASZ FOR ROLLING STONE