President Trump has been taking flack for his endorsements lately. Honestly, looking at endorsements like that of Mehmet Oz over Kathy Barnette, I can understand it. But I completely understand his withdrawal of support from Mo Brooks, who went on to lose his primary. The media is describing Trump’s unendorsement as “a personal grievance”, but the issue is far greater than mere personalities.

Watching state secretaries of state and county elections officials stonewall basic election integrity checks—the kind of basic fraud checking that any business does to verify that what comes in matches what goes out—it’s become increasingly obvious that election fraud in 2020 was not your standard margin of fraud.

Election fraud has never been something we should ignore. And yet not only is the left telling us to put fraud behind us, supposed conservatives in the beltway are also demanding that we put fraud behind us. The scuttlebutt about Trump’s not endorsing Mo Brooks is that Brooks switched from talking about the steal to advising that we put the steal behind us. The news media is calling it a “personal grievance” between Brooks and Trump.

I don’t know how much or even whether Brooks backed down from acknowledging the 2020 steal. I don’t live in Alabama and can’t trust anything the media says. But the 2020 election steal is not “a personal grievance”. If Brooks is really telling us to put concerns about an obviously stolen election behind us, he’s wrong, and dangerously so. Putting fraud behind us threatens every future election.

That’s the kind of thinking that helps conservatives continue losing. And it’s the kind of advice Trump doesn’t take well, for good reason. Conventional wisdom is that Trump has to focus on his opponent, not on election fraud. But that’s a drastic misunderstanding of what this election is about.

Trump wasn’t running against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and he isn’t running against Joe Biden in 2024. Biden¹ is going to lose worse in 2024 than he lost in 2020. That doesn’t mean the Republican candidate will win. Whatever candidate the Republicans put up in 2024 is not running against the Democratic candidate. They’re running against the establishment that put Biden over the top even though Biden lost. Running against Joe Biden is running against the wrong person. Trump appears to recognize that his true opponent is not Biden, and that he can’t win if all he does is beat Biden.

He tried that in 2020, and it was a lot like Hillary Clinton’s attempt to shore up her popular vote total in places like California. If you run the wrong race, you’re going to lose.

National Republicans are masters at running the wrong race.

Moving on from election fraud makes it impossible to win. Just like moving on from everything else the establishment wants us to accept, it’s a losing tactic. It’s the kind of thinking that helps conservatives continue as the Washington Generals of national politics. They love taking the easy way out. It means running against abortion but never actually ending it. It took Trump to end it. It means running on self-defense freedoms but continually compromising our self-defense rights away. As John Cornyn brags about doing.

Trump, surprisingly to me, didn’t play that game. And today, Trump isn’t running against Joe Biden or whoever the beltway crowd puts in his place. Trump appears to be running against the criminals that put Biden over the top in 2020 even though Biden lost—and that includes a lot of Republicans.

Trump appears to recognize that his true opponent is not whoever runs against him, and that he can’t win if all he does is beat that person. Given 2020, this ought to be self evident. I’m not saying I see how he’s going to win. I remain convinced that part of the reason he won in 2016 is that the beltway didn’t realize how much they’d need to cheat. They thought he was going to lose.

I’m not the only person who saw that. I don’t think Trump ever internalized it. But he gets it now, and moving on from the fraud that everyone saw, and that everyone also saw the beltway crowd accept, will not help him.

Telling Trump to betray the voters is bad advice.

Hopefully, the states that did not “move on”, and who implemented basic election integrity reforms will make a difference.

Trump has made his political career out of saying, over and over, the obvious truths everyone in power wants us to forget. Pretending that fraud did not rule the 2020 election would lose him the support of voters who want a politician willing to tell those truths. Which is probably why the beltway class keeps telling him to put the fraud behind him. They want him to lose, and they want to demoralize the American people who saw fraud happen in real time.

Convincing Trump to betray voters would accomplish both those goals.

It’s especially disappointing, but not unexpected, to see Trump’s supporters give him the same counterproductive advice.