Whoever Smelt It, Dealt It
Do you remember family road trips when someone would let one rip, unleashing a truly unholy, silent but deadly vengeance upon all who were helplessly trapped within the confines of the already stifling automobile? Holding your breath, you would reach in frantic desperation for the window crank (yes, I am that kind of old), and stick your head into the unpolluted stream of air that revived your nostrils as you gulped down as much unaffected oxygen as you could. Pulling your head back into the car and checking first for any persistent remnants of the noxious odor, you would then look directly at one of your siblings with thinly veiled tones of unfettered accusation and ask “Who farted?” In varying degrees of adamance and credibility, every occupant of the vehicle would proffer some form of denial, but you knew that one of them was lying, if only you knew which one. Moments later, your oldest sibling, ironically implicating their own guilt, would harken back to the age old wisdom, “Whoever smelt it, dealt it.” Well, it may not have proven true in that particular case, but we all know it turns out to be accurate far more often than not, and when it comes to Trump claiming election fraud, he definitely dealt this disgusting waft of shit.
Trump has been whining about voter fraud for more than a decade now, and what evidence has he provided? Jack shit. Everything he has pointed to has been debunked repeatedly upon judicial review and even most members of his own party. Even William Barr, his ass-kissing Attorney General, said that there was zero evidence of any significant voter fraud in the 2020 election. I have written about this topic on more than one occasion, pointing out that Trump claimed voter fraud as far back as 2016 and appointed Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a longtime proponent of voter suppression efforts, to do a thorough investigation of election fraud. Kobach found exactly four cases. Four. Since returning to office in 2024, the Trump administration has been demanding state voter rolls, even though his DOJ has only found a handful of cases.
In particular, Trump has been vehement about mail-in voting, which he ironically uses himself, claiming that this system leads to widespread corruption and fraud. The Brookings Institute has rebutted this assertion, however, offering up actual facts to support their defense of mail-in voting, “Cases of mail voting fraud are very rare, accounting for only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast, or about four cases out of every 10 million mail votes.” Clearly, despite all of Trump’s fallacious contentions, American elections, are, by and large, fair and secure. But don’t take my word for it. Take it from Chris Krebs, a lifelong Republican and Trump’s own appointee to serve as director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who said, when he testified in front of the Committee on Homeland Security in reference to the 2020 election, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history . . . . There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised . . . While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections . . . we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too.”
So why is Trump so adamant about voter fraud in the first place? This gets back to the whole fart in the car episode. After all, if Trump is so genuinely concerned about election integrity, why would he have ordered his administration to cut nearly 1000 CISA agents or roughly a third of their entire workforce? The TRUTH is that Trump doesn’t give a French rat’s tuchus about election integrity. This is the same piss bucket that asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” him 11,780 votes. No, the only concern Trump has about election tampering is how he can commit it.
The whole premise of the “Whoever smelt it dealt it” idiom is that it seeks to expose the ruse of the true farter. It suggests that it is indeed the farter himself who has rushed to condemn others in a sinister plot to cover up, in a manner of speaking, their own dastardly deed. In order to distract from the election tampering he and his cronies have been engaging in for years right out in the open. It’s the classic Rope A Dope, where Trump, of course, is the dope.
Screaming his head off about about voter fraud affords Trump the opportunity to perpetrate real and far more widespread dismantling of our elections while his foolish supporters go looking for scattered cases of James’s dead great aunt voting in an election. Do you really think illegals are voting in our elections? They’re too scared to even leave their homes these days, never mind waiting in a line outside town hall to vote.
No, the real voter fraud is coming right before our very eyes. Trump was right that there was interference in the 2016 presidential election, but it wasn’t for Hilary, it was for him. After a lengthy 2017 investigation, the CIA, FBI, and NSA concluded that the Russian government conducted an extensive influence campaign to denigrate Hillary Clinton and show a clear preference for Donald Trump. This came after a July 27, 2016 news conference where Donald Trump stated, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” While investigators were never able to discover a smoking gun linking Trump directly to the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 election, we can all smell what really happened there, and that emboldened Trump to be even more brazen the next go-around.
After six long years of having to listen to Trump whine about the 2020 election, no one has presented even moderately credible evidence of significant voter fraud impacting the results of the election. I mean, Trump just held a press conference not to update the country on the state of the war in Iran but to expose the devious plot that China somehow got their hands on publically available voter registration rolls. As it became clear that he had lost the election and that he was not going to be able to persuade hapless state officials to overturn election results, he pivoted to undermining the integrity of our voting process and conniving to having states and his own vice-president refuse to certify the election, all on the false grounds that he had actually won the election. And when even that wouldn’t work, he fomented the first attempted coup in American history, misleading thousands of his guileless supporters to commit treason by waging a violent siege on our own nation’s capitol.
But as we head into the upcoming midterms, Trump has not been deterred in his quest to use voting fraud as a mechanism for his own rigging of elections, and if anything, he has only learned from the lessons of the past, focusing on manipulating the election process before it even begins. Republicans have been pushing to implement the SAVE Act, a concerted effort to disenfranchise legitimate American voters under the unsubstantiated premise that somehow thousands of dead and illegal persons are voting in our elections. Meanwhile, Trump is attempting to shore up his support in state legislatures and ratchet control over elections from the states and place it, in direct violation of the Elections Clause of the United States Constitution, more squarely in the hands of the federal government his party controls. Call it one of those silent but deadly cases of gaseous disturbance.
But we have played this game before. We know the cardinal rule that whoever smelt it, dealt it. And it’s well past time that we crank down the windows in the family station wagon and throw Trump’s flatulent ass out of it.
Steven Craig is the author of the best-selling novel WAITING FOR TODAY, as well as numerous published poems, short stories, and dramatic works. Read his blog TRUTH: in 1000 Words or Less every THURSDAY at www.waitingfortoday.com
