The most important outcome of the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral primary may be that the Republican Party no longer accepts the legitimacy of election defeats. This reflex has spread up and down the party, to everyone including the trailing candidate, Spencer Pratt, and the president of the United States, who grew so enraged when the Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker challenged his election denial that he left the set mid-interview.The refusal to accept the prospect of a Republican defeat in L.A. is bizarre and revealing. The race has not been called, but over the weekend, as more ballots were counted, Pratt fell into third place. Republicans had believed that L.A.’s struggles with public order would create an opening for their candidate. The right-of-center Free Press published seven hopeful stories with headlines such as “Inside Spencer Pratt’s Viral Video Machine” and “Heidi Montag Is Already LA’s First Lady.”The trouble is that the city’s electorate is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the Republican candidate is a reality-television star with a fondness for pseudoscientific conspiracy theories and nothing resembling qualification for office. Pratt tried to elide the GOP’s reputation in L.A., but Trump blew up that plan by describing him as “a big MAGA person.”The first batch of votes counted showed Pratt in second place, a position that would qualify him for a runoff in November against the leading candidate, currently the incumbent, Karen Bass. But as more votes have trickled in, Pratt has dropped behind City Councilmember Nithya Raman; there are more votes to count, and the final result remains uncertain. This is a predictable dynamic for the state’s voting system; late-arriving mail-in ballots consistently skew Democratic.[Read: The election deniers are winning]You might suppose that “Republicans tend to vote more promptly than Democrats” and “Government agencies in California operate slowly” are hypotheses that conservatives, of all people, would have an easy time believing. Instead, they have decided the election was rigged.Conservative accounts on X exploded over the weekend with confident assertions that Pratt had fallen behind because of vote-rigging. The claims were not confined to radicals, attention-seekers, or obscure figures, but also came from producers for major radio shows, Fox News columnists, right-leaning celebrities, and sports pundits.Tellingly, Meghan McCain, who has at times sided with the party’s mainstream faction over its MAGA wing, wrote, “For whatever it’s worth, people in my life who have never ever spoken about stolen elections in any capacity are now saying this about California.”“This” refers to Trump’s interview with Welker, which aired Sunday. Trump slowly worked himself up into a lather. He began by answering questions about his proposed government fund for supposed victims of government “weaponization.” Trump’s deputies have said that the fund is dead, but Welker wanted to nail down the president’s own position on the matter.Trump used the question to repeatedly insist that he and his supporters were innocent victims of government retribution, which he described as “violent” and carried out by “thugs” and “dirty cops.”Welker permitted these wild lies to go unchallenged for nearly two minutes before she noted that he had no evidence for these claims, and that many of the criminals whom Trump pardoned pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers during the Capitol riot. The brief interjection of reality into Trump’s fantastical diatribe appears to have angered him. He began shouting that FBI agents on January 6 ushered people into the Capitol. Welker gently noted he had no evidence for that claim, either.Trump began hurling insults at Welker and the media—“people like you; the fake, dirty press; the crooked press.” Then he connected his desire to pay money to insurrectionists to his claim that the 2020 election had been stolen, and connected that claim to his belief the 2026 L.A. mayoral race was also being stolen. “The election was rigged,” he said, “It was a dirty election. And it’s happening again right now in California.”Welker, by then recognizing that Trump was evading her attempts to clear up his stance on the fund, noted that he lacked any basis for his accusations about the L.A. election.“Do you have evidence?” she asked.“All I have to do is look,” he replied.“But, sir, that’s not evidence,” Welker responded.At this point, Trump flew off the handle, spewing a series of insults against Welker and the news media, and then walking off the set.That a relatively mainstream figure such as McCain would watch this exchange and come away feeling that it’s important for her to point out that her friends also feel this way speaks volumes about the Republican Party’s current state.Trump has been rejecting unfavorable election results for nearly a decade. He questioned the final tally of the 2016 election because he couldn’t accept losing the popular vote, and instead proclaimed that Democrats had engaged in mass voter fraud in California.Even if Democrats could manufacture millions of fake votes undetected, it would obviously have made more sense for them to stage this conspiracy in a purple state. The intellectual rigor of Trump’s vote-stealing theories has hardly improved since. If Bass had wished to rig the election in her favor, she would have had an incentive to favor Pratt as the second-place finisher, rather than Raman, a fellow Democrat who stands at least some chance of unseating Bass in November.[Read: Hope, change, troll]One theory for why Democrats allegedly rigged the election to eliminate Pratt, proposed by William Shipley, a former federal prosecutor who represented multiple January 6 defendants, holds that Pratt’s advertising campaign was so powerful that Democrats couldn’t run the risk of allowing it to continue. “I think they did not want to endure another 5 months of Pratt’s political campaign that pounded on and pointed out the Lib/Prog Admin. of Bass is corrupt and incompetent,” he wrote on X.That Democrats carried out a massive criminal conspiracy, leaving no trace of concrete evidence behind, to spare the incumbent mayor from online ads is the kind of conspiracy theory that no sane figure would touch. And for a period of time, many Republicans resisted these kinds of absurdities. But Trump has driven most of those dissidents out of the party, and has either drawn the remainder to his side through the gravitational force of partisanship or has intimidated them into silence.The party is now divided between Republicans who silently tolerate Trump’s election lies and those who repeat them loudly. For a Republican of any standing to concede that Trump lost the 2020 election fairly is now almost unheard-of. The predictable result of this imbalance has been to give the loud side more and more credibility.Trump appeared to lose control of his emotions during his interview, and it is possible he did. But he also has a shrewd grasp of the blunt force contained within the loud, insistent lie. This is the tactic he has used to overpower nearly all opposition within his party, to turn his hallucinations into canon. The true targets of his rage are not news reporters but fellow Republicans, whom Trump has come to understand he can bully into complete submission.