In President Donald Trump’s warped worldview, all elections — not just his own — are either won or rigged. Democracy and the will of the people are irrelevant. Trump alone decides who the victor is, otherwise the election was stolen.

The newest exhibit is the fair and square defeat of Los Angeles mayoral contender Spencer Pratt, a self-styled MAGA candidate previously best known for appearing in the MTV reality show “The Hills” and being a crystal salesman. Spencer finished in third place in the nonpartisan preliminary vote and failed to advance to the runoff election in November which will feature the top two finishers.

Pratt had been in second place during the early vote counting, but slipped to third as the tallying wrapped up. Thus, that was “evidence” of a theft according to MAGA influencers, strategists and politicians up to and including Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, who have proclaimed without any proof claimed that the election was fraudulent. Trump, on his media site Truth Social, posted that it was “not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost.”

It is in fact very possible and indeed not a head-scratcher that a political neophyte without any real policy plans running a campaign predicated solely on channeling voter frustrations would come up short. If there’s anything the last decade-plus of politics have shown us, it’s that that message has cachet, but voters have also come (perhaps too slowly) to realize that a pure protest vote has consequences and that being an outsider does not mean someone is going to do better.

If anything, it’s a surprise that a Republican reality star with no experience even managed a quarter of the vote in deep-blue L.A. — a marker of pretty acute discontent — not a surprise that he lost.

As with prior election denial efforts, MAGA is hanging their red hat on the fact that their candidate seemed to be doing better earlier on before falling back as votes continued to be counted. This kind of swing is normal, especially in California, which has universal mail-in ballots that takes time for the ballots to be received, opened, verified and counted.

What some Republicans love to call “irregularities” or “vote change” is really the full counting of all the votes, which is exactly how elections are supposed to work. The undercurrent of these complaints is that they want only certain votes to be counted (the ones for them) or, if that’s not enough, for votes to be manufactured in their favor, as Trump infamously asked of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after his own election loss in 2020.

This is the one trick left for every Trump-backed candidate who loses any election; any win is the undisputed will of the people, and any loss is undoubtedly the result of fraud. Why even bother having elections at all? In that case the Republican should just win by default.

It’s not that the MAGA crowd fail to realize that this is doing potentially long-term damage not only to specific elections themselves, but to the public’s buy-in of our democratic system as a whole. They understand this and embrace it; Trump, their king, has been very clear that he does not care one whit about our system of government.

Fortunately, despite their best efforts, elections still mean something in this country. It is up to Congress, the courts and state officials to be vigilant in ensuring this remains true as Trump and his MAGA movement continue trying to chip away at electoral legitimacy, in the midterms and beyond.

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