Trump is an illegitimate president, but he’s not the first. The last Republican who was elected president without fraud or naked treason was Dwight D. Eisenhower. And it’s damn well past time that Democrats started telling the story.

But let’s start with Trump, and then go to Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.

Greg Palast recently did the math, and it’s now irrefutable: the only reason Trump is in the White House is because over 4 million Americans were either denied their right to vote or their votes were discarded.

The US Elections Assistance Commission data tells the damning story: a staggering 4.7 million voters were wrongfully purged from voter rolls before the election. By August 2024, self-proclaimed “vigilante” vote fraud hunters had challenged the eligibility of 317,886 voters across multiple states. When Election Day arrived, the Georgia NAACP estimated challenges had exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.

. . .

One can only wonder how much better off America would be if six Republican Presidents hadn’t stolen or inherited a stolen White House and used it to put rightwing cranks on the Supreme Court and other federal benches while cutting taxes on the morbidly rich (creating a $34 trillion national debt), destroying unions, and offshoring over 50,000 factories and 25 million good-paying union jobs.

America has ignored GOP crimes to seize and hold the White House long enough. The immunity Ford gave Nixon has echoed down through the decades, leading to a packed Supreme Court that gave new immunity to Trump and two unnecessary and illegal wars (not to mention tax cuts for billionaires that have gutted our middle class).

It’s time, at long last, to tell America the true story of Republican electoral crimes.