Heilemann: Trump ‘Has Telegraphed His Desire to Try to Steal This Election’

MSNBC national affairs analyst John Heilemann on Wednesday’s “Morning Joe” suggested President Donald Trump is going to “try to steal” the 2020 election.

According to Heilemann, Trump has “telegraphed his desire to try to steal this election.”

“I feel uncomfortable at any point at this point talking about anything being put away only because, I mean, we’ve seen opposite consistent polling out of those two states that suggest a strong and steady lead for Biden and now a widening lead if this poll is to be believed in Wisconsin,” Heilemann outlined. “No one in the world thinks Joe Biden’s going to win Wisconsin by 17 points. The reason I have any hesitance at this point — we’re now like less than a week out, right — we’re getting down to that place where some of the things we talked about for the last six months besides Joe Biden’s steady lead in a lot of polling, besides his strong position in these battleground states, some of the stuff we’ve talked about in the last six months besides that are now starting to kind of rear their heads, right, which is, you know, related to … the Great Lake states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, all of them have voting systems that are going to be really put to the test. … All three of them have said that they don’t expect to have an outcome on election night. Any state that does not have an outcome on election night is a state that Donald Trump has already told us he’s going to mess with — at least to try to mess with, rhetorically.”

He continued, “And we’re starting to see signs of that in these closing days on the home stretch here with Trump out starting to talk about that we need to see a result on November 3 and anything that’s not out on November 3 is suspect, and I’m going to cry fraud where we don’t have a final count on election night. And those three Great Lake states are in that category. I raise it because it is something we’ve talked about for the last six months, but I think, you know, in these closing days, it’s easy for us all to forget that they would start to treat this like a normal campaign with a normal president who treats the process with respect. This is a president who has telegraphed his desire to try to steal this election for the last six months. And now as we’re starting to see these long lines, these various questions about, you know, the Supreme Court intervening in the Wisconsin case, the court fights happening, particularly in those three … Great Lakes Midwest states. I am concerned not that Joe Biden’s position is not strong in all three, because I think it is. In fact, I saw some private polling yesterday that suggests that he’s up eight in Pennsylvania, which I thought was some polling that I found quite credible. It’s not that his position isn’t strong. It those places, but those are places where I think the president’s strategy doesn’t just stop over these last six days. The president’s strategy for how to win in those states extends beyond Election Day and extends into realms that are legal and sometimes extra-legal.”

Because of his belief that Trump will try to steal the election, Heilemann urged Democrats to not get a false sense of security from looking at polling showing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the lead.

“I think no one in the Democratic Party should rest on what the sense of security about anything that they’re seeing in any of these closing days’ polls. This could be a knife fight that goes on well after Election Day,” he concluded.

Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent