According to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and other Democratic attorneys, former President Donald Trump has now been convicted of feloniously rigging and stealing the 2016 election.

Except, based on the timeline of events in the case, Bragg's theory of Trump's supposed criminality is even more conspiratorial than the purported election interference conspiracy Trump was accused of engaging in, according to National Review.

Also, to accept the claims made by Bragg and others, one must ignore the past four years of fervent Democratic assertions that any questioning of certified election results is equivalent to a direct attack on democracy and the very foundation of the American republic.

Trump's actions in 2017 somehow impacted the 2016 election

National Review pointed to a recent post on Democracy Docket from prominent Democratic attorney Marc Elias that pushed a deeply conspiratorial narrative that former President Trump was "plotting his next crime" to steal the 2024 election in ways that were similar to his supposed rigging of the 2016 election and unsuccessful effort to do the same in 2020.

"In 2016, Donald Trump seemed to pull an inside straight by narrowly winning Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin while losing the popular vote by three million. We now know, Trump committed 34 felonies to win that election," Elias wrote about DA Bragg's conviction of the former president.

"Without these crimes, he seems almost certain to have lost to Hillary Clinton. She would have been sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. She would have filled two Supreme Court vacancies and enacted her legislative agenda," he added. "Roe v. Wade would never have been overturned. The progress made under the Obama administration would have been continued. Following a global pandemic, millions might still be alive. As we reflect on the outcome of the New York trial, we should pause to acknowledge that history was tragically derailed by Trump’s felonious conduct."

According to National Review, however, that nonsensical assertion from Elias is based on the same absurd argument that underlay Bragg's prosecution of Trump that would essentially require a time machine to even potentially be true -- that alleged crimes committed by Trump in 2017 somehow altered the outcome of the 2016 election.

None of this makes any sense or is even physically possible

At the start of former President Trump's recently concluded criminal trial in Manhattan, Reason magazine thoroughly exposed how DA Bragg's "'Election Interference' Narrative Is Nonsensical" based solely on the timeline of alleged events.

Trump was accused, and ultimately convicted of, feloniously falsifying business records in 2017, after he was already sworn in and serving as president, to reimburse ex-attorney Michael Cohen for a perfectly legal nondisclosure agreement and "hush money" payment in 2016 to porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about an alleged 2006 affair with Trump.

According to Bragg and others, the agreement and payment to Daniels were somehow illegal by way of depriving voters of negative information about the Republican nominee, and Trump's reimbursement of Cohen after the fact somehow served to conceal the initial supposed crime that isn't actually a crime.

Yet, as both Reason and National Review essentially observed, Trump would have needed disruption of the space-time continuum for his 2017 series of repayments to Cohen to somehow influence and interfere with an election that had already been conducted the year prior.

Democratic "election trutherism" is based on a hoax built atop other hoaxes

According to The Federalist, "Trump’s real crime was winning the 2016 election -- and the show trial in Manhattan was the culmination of the election denialism left-wing sycophants have spent the past eight years spreading."

Ironically enough, this hoax claim that Trump rigged and stole the 2016 election through supposedly falsified business records in 2017 stemmed directly from an FBI raid on Cohen in 2018 as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's ridiculous investigation of the provably false hoax claim that Trump had conspired with Russia to rig and steal the 2016 election, which in turn stemmed from actual fraud perpetrated by the Hillary Clinton campaign to interfere with that same election.

In the end, The Federalist concluded, "Democrats’ inability to accept the results of the 2016 election culminated in the invention of the latest hoax -- that Trump 'stole' the election by paying for a non-disclosure agreement."