In the months after the 2020 election, Donald Trump leaned on his campaign to launch ad blitzes and legal challenges to the results, insisting to his supporters that the election was “a long way from over.” He even told state and federal courts he was suing in his capacity as a political candidate.

Now, in a bid to derail criminal charges, he’s saying the opposite. At least six times in the past two weeks, Trump has declared that the election was “long over” by the time he began pushing state officials and then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn his defeat.

It’s a new piece of rhetoric that’s meant to bolster Trump’s assertion of “presidential immunity” from his criminal charges for interfering with the transfer of power. He wasn’t a candidate anymore, Trump’s new theory goes, so he must have been doing his job as president to ensure elections are fair.

But there’s a problem: It flies in the face of the legal arguments Trump made three years ago, during his frenetic push to subvert the election results.

[It wouldn’t matter anyway. Trump was contesting the results *in court* at the time as a candidate, not via executive action as president. Even in the 2022 midterms, Trump used the same rhetoric to argue that the election could still be reversed, a constitutional impossibility and certainly not within any supposed powers as president. His court filings may demonstrate the absurdity of this tactical shift in rhetoric, but the absurdity exists regardless. — Ed]