Now that Donald Trump has earned his fourth criminal indictment, the MAGA base of the Republican Party has rallied around Trump’s dismissals of the legal charges he’s facing. We hear across the MAGAverse that the prosecutions targeting the former president are simply “election interference”—aimed at derailing Trump’s 2024 reelection bid. Trump defenders from Senator Ted Cruz to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene all intone the refrain, as Trump himself keeps hammering away at it. And now that court dates are in play for Trump’s federal election-tampering case, the charge of election interference on the right will become a deafening chorus, alongside the dark MAGA vision of Trump’s victimization at the hands of a “weaponized” and ideologically driven “two-tiered justice system.”

On one level, the depiction of the Trump prosecutions as politically choreographed election interference is classic Orwellian doublethink: In both his Washington and Georgia trials, Trump himself is charged with interfering in the 2020 election in order to seize power in the failed January 6 coup attempt. As a legal claim, Trump’s defense doesn’t rise above the “I know you are, but what am I?” logic that resounds through talk-radio hate fests and cable-news hits.

Indeed, weary chroniclers of right-wing legal rhetoric may recall that Senator Mitch McConnell used the photographic negative of such claims—the no-less-spurious contention that a pending election would contaminate the solemn congressional deliberations about the country’s legal future—to deep-six Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the US Supreme Court. (It is, admittedly, difficult to keep this precedent firmly in mind, since McConnell and the Republicans promptly trashed this line of reasoning to streamline Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination just weeks ahead of the 2020 presidential balloting.)

But the opportunism and hypocrisy of the election interference charge are just its surface features, shared in common with a long line of Trumpian catchphrases, from “fake news” to “the deep state.” What’s more telling about the claim is its instrumental view of elections themselves—together with the principal actors who are supposed to be exercising agency in them, the American people. In the wild-swinging rhetoric of electoral corruption on the right, only some elections and actors are conferred legitimacy. According to this backward-reeling account of American democracy, the 74 million Trump voters who turned out in 2020 are always and forever the great injured Real American majority, while the 81 million who cast their ballots for Biden are virtual nonentities—fictions of a cunning deep state.