What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to destroy Americans' faith in democracy.

Trump's latest attack on trust in the sanctity of America's elections took the form of an interview with the Daily Caller in which he claimed that Republicans lost elections because "people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote, and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again."

As with his "forged ballots" claim from earlier in the week, Trump presented no evidence—because where voter fraud is concerned, there is none. This has been established by countless studies over and over and over again in recent years. 

The nonpartisan United States Election Project found 35 credible accusations of voter impersonation out of more than 834,000,000 votes cast between 2000 and 2014. The Washington Post found four more reported cases of voter fraud in 2016—three of them committed by Trump voters.

In other words, Trump is saying that because one out of every 24 million voters may be trying to vote more than once, elections should be disregarded—now that he knows the outcome.

In this case, there is very little doubt that Trump is lying, and not simply confused about how voting works. But it would be understandable if Trump were confused, because while he was a private citizen, he didn't bother doing it very often. He cast an invalid ballot last year, and that wasn't even the first time he'd flubbed as a voter. In 2004, he somehow managed to break voting rules on camera, when he filled out a provisional ballot in his limousine, away from a polling place, while filming an Access Hollywood segment. (Trump says he turned it back in, but no such ballot would have been counted.)  

So what?

• Undermining faith in democracy itself is what authoritarians do.