Donald Trump faced mounting suspicion of hatching a plot to steal next week’s presidential election as Democrats and commentators focused on his references to a “little secret” at Sunday night’s tumultuous Madison Square Garden rally.
The allusions initially attracted little notice amid the angry backlash provoked by racist jokes and incendiary rhetoric from a succession of warm-up speakers, including an offensive comment about Puerto Ricans that even Trump’s own campaign felt obliged to disavow.
However, some observers and Democratic politicians believed the most telling remark of the night came from the Republican nominee himself after he introduced Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, on stage and alluded to a shared secret.
“We gotta get the congressmen elected and we gotta get the senators elected,” Trump told the crowd, referring to the congressional elections at stake next week.
“We can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House. Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a little secret – we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”
Trump embellished the tease with no further clues. But commentators and some Democrats drew their own conclusions.
In its Playbook column, Politico described the aside as “potentially … sinister comments that could be a reference to the House settling a contested election”.
Dan Goldman, a Democratic representative from New York, was more explicit, telling CNN that Trump’s motivation for staging the rally – in a state he has no chance of winning – was boosting Republican candidates in an effort to ensure a Republican majority in Congress at a time when it will have the role of certifying the presidential election result.
“Why did Donald Trump come to New York nine days before the election? The state is going to go to Kamala Harris,” Goldman said.
“The answer is that the House really runs through New York. There are seven races that could go either way in the house, and that will likely determine the majority.
“On January 6, the certification of the electoral college will happen again, and as we know from 2021, whoever is in control of the House of Congress will have a lot of say on what happens on January 6. I suspect Donald Trump’s little secret plan with Mike Johnson is a backup plan for when he loses and he tries to go to the House of Representatives to throw out the electoral college.”
The situation under a Republican-controlled Congress would be a reverse of the certification process that followed the 2020 election, Goldman said. Then, Trump tried to deploy the then vice-president, Mike Pence – presiding over affairs in his constitutional role – to block the procedure at a time when the Senate and the House were controlled by the Democrats.
The gambit failed when Pence refused to play along, precipitating the attack on the US Capitol by a Trump-supporting mob, some of whom called for Pence to be hanged.
“If it’s the reverse, the Republicans have a lot more opportunity and a lot more possibilities for overturning this election,” Goldman said. “That I believe is what Donald Trump’s secret with Mike Johnson was.”
Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, played a key role in Trump’s attempt to reverse Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, supporting a Texas lawsuit that attempted to overturn the results in four swing states. He also voted with 146 other Republicans in Congress in favour of overturning the results.
On Monday, he responded obliquely to accusations that he and Trump were planning a repeat scenario but did not deny it – instead switching the focus to supposed “secrets” the Democrats had withheld.
“Speaking of secrets, Harris knew Biden was physically and mentally impaired and kept it a secret,” he wrote, referring to unproven accusations that the White House had covered up an age-related decline in the president’s cognitive abilities.
“They also knew that Russia collusion was a fake and kept that secret too. It appears that all those secrets didn’t matter to the media because they all helped Democrats. But this one might help Donald Trump and now they care?
“By definition, a secret is not to be shared – and I don’t intend to share this one.”
