‘This was a coup.’ Trump primes supporters to challenge a Harris win.

From the moment Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the surprise Democratic presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump began arguing that she was anointed through a “coup” rather than chosen by primary voters. After barely mentioning election integrity at the Republican convention in July, Trump is now casting the upcoming election as “rigged” against him and baselessly labeling any hurdle in his path as election interference.

“This was an overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow,” Trump said at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Saturday, referring to Harris replacing Biden on the ticket. He later added: “They deposed a president. It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”

Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in this year’s election are reminiscent of the tactics he used in the 2020 campaign and indicate how he could again seek to delegitimize the results if he loses, setting the stage for another combustible fight over the presidency, election and national security experts said.

“This is Donald Trump’s playbook: ‘There’s a deep state, they’re all out to get me,’” said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as a senior Department of Homeland Security official during the Trump administration and is now among his conservative critics. “Even here — as he’s going to have to face a stronger, harder candidate to defeat — his default is, ‘Well, this couldn’t possibly be legal. This is a coup. This is wrong,’ even though there are no facts to back that up.”

While some of this is “just for show,” Neumann said, Trump and his allies are also setting up the “next version of ‘Stop the Steal.’”

Trump has long insisted that his political failures are the result of some malevolent force trying to keep him out of power, and he has weakened faith in the U.S. election system despite widespread evidence that the results can be trusted. When asked to comment for this article, Trump’s campaign responded with a statement attacking Harris and again characterizing her nomination as part of a “coup.”

“President Trump and our campaign have never been more confident that we are going to win this election,” spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said.

When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he falsely claimed that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) stole the Iowa caucuses, and he told his supporters that the general election was “absolutely being rigged” against him. After winning, he falsely said his loss in the popular vote was due to “millions of people who voted illegally.” In 2020, he baselessly claimed the influx of mail-in ballots amid the global pandemic led to widespread fraud that cost him the election, and as Congress gathered to certify the results, Trump supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol and tried to halt the process.

For months, Trump had boasted that he was on a glide path to victory in a rematch against Biden, and he told his supporters the only way he could lose was if Democrats cheated. But he began ratcheting up his warnings about the election process when Harris began drawing massive crowds and surpassed him in several national and swing state polls, including some in which he had led Biden.

Now Trump has refused to say that he will accept the outcome of the election if he loses.

“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Trump said in a May interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

The overarching message, often pushed by Trump himself, is that the race has entered a make-or-break stage in which a shadowy Democratic apparatus is poised to steal Republican votes. While doing this, Trump has tried to deflect attacks that he is a threat to democracy by insisting that he’s the true protector of it, recently saying he “took a bullet for democracy” and that Democrats “are the real THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”

Through this year’s presidential campaign, Trump has portrayed himself as a victim of a Democratic power grab. He blamed his dozens of criminal charges on the Biden administration, accusing his original opponent of weaponizing the judicial system as a form of election interference.

Since Harris jumped in the race last month, Trump has repeatedly sought to sow doubts about her integrity. He attacked her racial identity, accusing her of only recently identifying as Black, which is not true. And earlier this month, Trump falsely accused Harris of using artificial intelligence to manipulate a campaign rally photo to make the crowd look larger than it was. He called for her to be “disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and added: “Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!” In reality, Harris attracted a massive crowd.

In an Aug. 6 post on Truth Social, Trump presented a fantastical story that envisioned Biden, “whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him,” crashing this week’s Democratic National Convention to take back the nomination.

“They forced him out. It was a coup. We had a coup,” Trump said of Biden at an Aug. 9 rally in Bozeman, Mont. “That was the first coup of the history of our country, and it was very successful.”

Supporters at his rallies have embraced and echoed those sentiments.

In Montana, Carol Taylor, 62, said: “The people, the Democrats, are getting cheated, and they don’t realize it, because they’re not getting to vote for their candidate.”

“I think that it’s almost like a coup to get Kamala Harris in there,” said Rachelle Galinski, 55, at a Trump rally in St. Cloud, Minn.

Another St. Cloud rallygoer, 35-year-old Jose Chapa Jr., said: “The party that said they stand for democracy didn’t even let their people vote for who they wanted to vote for. It’s pretty sick.”

Replacing Biden on the ticket was within the Democratic Party’s powers. Though primary voters chose Biden, they technically elected a slate of delegates to choose their nominee. Once Biden dropped out, those delegates were free to pick a replacement, and they almost unanimously chose Harris.

Yet, conspiracy theories abound claiming the Democrats circumvented protocol to name Harris as nominee and warning they’ll do the same in hopes of defeating Trump. Experts in extremism warn that Trump’s use of terms like “coup” to describe Harris’s candidacy could rile up his hard-right supporters in ways similar to the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Harris’s swift rise has pierced the MAGA movement’s certainty of a win in November, they say, putting Trump’s most loyal followers on the defensive in ways that analysts say undermines faith in elections and heightens the risk of unrest.

Joe Walsh, a former GOP U.S. representative from Illinois who launched a long-shot primary challenge to Trump in 2020, said Trump’s attacks on Harris as an illegitimate candidate are resonating with his MAGA base.

“They’re latching on to this, that what the Democrats just did, that’s a coup,” Walsh said. “This is what I hear all day. That was the attack on democracy. That’s what they’re going to do to push back on the legitimate charge that Trump tried to overthrow an election four years ago. I come from MAGA world. It’s working. They believe it.”

On publicly visible message boards, pro-Trump extremists are careful to stop short of calling for a violent response, though they infuse their messages with battle references and pledges of “no compromise, no surrender.”

“National politics has been more or less upended in the past month,” leaving the country “in a much more volatile place,” said Kieran Doyle, North America research manager for Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a global conflict monitoring group.

Even before the tumult of July, Doyle noted, Trump and his supporters had been pushing the idea “of a corrupted system that was trying to prevent him coming back to power at any cost.”

But there’s also a lack of coherence in the messaging in these far-right corners of the internet, as many Trump supporters’ arguments seem divided on whether he’s likely to lose in November because Democrats have once again rigged the system — or if he’s likely to win and the media is misleading the nation into believing otherwise.

Hannah Knowles and Marianne Levine contributed to this report.