U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) released a statement Tuesday condemning former President Donald Trump’s claims that Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign turnout numbers were “fake,” noting that Trump was using them to undermine the legitimacy of Harris’ popularity and that it was a sign that he would try to sow doubt about the outcome of the 2024 presidential election if he loses to Harris in the fall.

In a Truth Social post over the weekend, Trump sought to create uncertainty about the size of the crowd at Harris’ rally in Detroit, Michigan.

“Did anyone notice that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was no one on the plane and she was piloting it using artificial intelligence and showing a huge ‘crowd’ of so-called supporters, BUT THERE WASN’T THERE!” Trump said, adding for emphasis that, at least in his eyes, she was “a CHEAT.”

Trump’s claims are completely fabricated – other video footage from that day shows that the image in question is real and that the crowd of thousands that greeted Harris at the airport was real.

Trump also claimed that a maintenance worker acted as a whistleblower and said the image was a fake, but in fact that worker did not exist.

In response to these allegations, Sanders said that Trump had not acted “stupidly,” but that his false statement had a purpose: to arouse distrust among his own supporters so that, in the event of an election defeat in November, they would be more willing to confirm his falsehoods regarding alleged election irregularities.

“When (Trump) claims that ‘nobody’ showed up to a 10,000-person Harris rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all the time, there is method behind his madness,” Sanders said in a written statement. “What Trump is doing is clearly and dangerously the basis for overturning the election results if he loses.”

Sanders continued:

If you can convince your supporters that the thousands of people who attended a televised rally don’t exist, it won’t be hard to convince them that the election results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are “fake” and “fraudulent.”

“This is what destroying trust in institutions is all about,” Sanders added. “This is what undermining democracy is all about. This is what fascism is all about.”

Not only are Trump and his presidential campaign trying to sow doubt about the size of crowds at Harris rallies in Detroit and elsewhere — making grandiose claims that crowds at his own rally are larger than they actually are, but that the mainstream media is allegedly not reporting on them — they are also claiming, without evidence, that poll results showing Harris ahead of him both nationally and in key swing states are falsified. A campaign spokesman said the polls understate his support among voters “with the clear intent and goal of depressing support” for Trump overall.

The attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the poll data are not really intended as a complaint about them per se, but “are merely meant to suggest that no measure of reality can be trusted unless it favors Trump,” The Washington Post Philip Bump said in a column this week.

“This is not about increasing Trump’s credibility. It’s about undermining everyone else’s credibility. This way, Trump can remind his supporters to reject the results in November, if they call the results correctly,” Bump added.

Trump gave similar signals in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election that he would not accept the election results unless they showed that he had won the White House for a second time. According to The Guardian This year, however, is different for Sam Levine, for two important reasons. First, a number of Trump loyalists who hold the same election-denying views have been appointed to local election boards across the country in recent years, making it more likely that erroneous and easily disproven fraud claims will be taken seriously when they shouldn’t be. And second, the legal arm of the Republican National Committee, led by former Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, is more willing to support Trump in his false election fraud claims than it did in 2020, with a virtual army of 100,000 poll watchers supporting their goals.

“While the law specifies what Congress must do when it receives the certificates from the electors, it doesn’t have much to say about what must happen in the run-up to the Electoral College vote,” Levine reported. “That could give Trump and his allies plenty of leeway to slow down certification and try in court to force states to miss their certification deadline.”