The making of a myth -- Nicole is discussing this story right now

[CatWoman]

ADDISON, Tex. — Key elements of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump took shape in an airplane hangar here two years earlier, promoted by a Republican businessman who has sold everything from Tex-Mex food in London to a wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream.

At meetings beginning late in 2018, as Republicans were smarting from midterm losses in Texas and across the country, Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and his associates delivered alarming presentations on electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors.

Briefings in the hangar had a clandestine air. Guests were asked to leave their cellphones outside before assembling in a windowless room. A member of Ramsland’s team purporting to be a “white-hat hacker” identified himself only by a code name.

Ramsland, a failed congressional candidate with a Harvard MBA, pitched a claim that seemed rooted in evidence: Voting-machine audit logs — lines of codes and time stamps that document the machines’ activities — contained indications of vote manipulation. In the retrofitted hangar that served as his company’s offices at the edge of a municipal airstrip outside Dallas, Ramsland attempted to persuade failed Republican candidates to challenge their election results and force the release of additional data that might prove manipulation.

“We had to find the right candidate,” said Laura Pressley, a former Ramsland ally whose own claim that audit logs showed fraud had been rejected in court two years earlier. “We had to find one who knew they won.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/trump-election-fraud-texas-businessman-ramsland-asog/

[Moostache]

1. This really took root in 2016...

Trump was planning to do this same "I was robbed" bullshit in 2016 (he had hinted at a non-peaceful transfer of power in the debates with Hillary)...in fact, I am convinced that he never really thought he would win; and that there was money to be made off of the rubes by claiming fraud - much the same as turning unwarranted media attention for 'birtherism' into political and economic power had been.

Grifters gonna grift after all!

He was sucking the supporters dry for YEARS BEFORE he ran for POTUS, and he really did think he could parlay the attention into just what he has done - funding to save his worthless ass from bankruptcy and ruin due to his utterly inept business management, fueled by ego, narcissism and sloth.

He was/is/ever shall be world without end a scumbag. He did not start to become one though after 2016...we was already one way earlier than that.

[moondust]

2. Even in 2012:

~
On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a "total sham" and a "travesty," while also making the claim that the United States is "not a democracy" after Obama secured his victory.

Trump even wrote on Twitter, "We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!"
~
Trump has longstanding history of calling elections 'rigged' if he doesn’t like the results

His big election lies may go back even farther than that if somebody looked close enough. I can't imagine he graciously accepted the results of 2008.

Not just election lies. 19 times Trump called jobs numbers ‘fake’ before they made him look good

[CatWoman]

3. damn

he's the energizer bunny of conspiracy theories

[moondust]

4. Yes indeed.