What happens when you reject the idea that the system actually works?

Before the 2022 midterm elections, New Mexico’s 14th House of Representatives District covered a large chunk of Albuquerque southwest of the Rio Grande. The district backed Joe Biden by a 40-point margin in 2020 — and that was before its boundaries were redrawn to shift northward, creeping closer to downtown, where Biden’s margins were even wider.

It is not surprising, then, that a Democrat won November’s state House race by a wide margin. Miguel Garcia, who has represented the 14th for more than a decade, earned about 74 percent of the vote, easily dispatching his Republican challenger. And that was that.

At least, in a perfect world.

In this world, however, Garcia’s opponent refused to concede, no matter how irrelevant such a demonstration might be to the results. When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 Republican nomination a week later, that opponent, Republican Solomon Peña, quickly endorsed the former president. After all, as Peña pointed out on Twitter, both he and Trump rejected the idea that their losses were legitimate. Beyond Peña’s pro-Trump regalia, he shared the former president’s uninterest in recognizing the results of a democratic election when those results weren’t what was desired.

Trump’s political career has both leveraged and amplified distrust in American institutions. He ran against the establishment in 2016, successfully, casting a nebulously defined group of “elites” as the true opponents of the American people. He spent the first years of his presidency railing against the Deep State in a fairly abstract way and the last year of his presidency targeting government experts directly. He cast health officials as devious or toxic, given their predilection for seeking robust efforts to combat the coronavirus. And he dismissed elections officials as corrupt or dishonest when they pointed out first, that voter fraud was rare and then, after the election, that little fraud had occurred.

The message Trump issued — again, one that he adopted and adapted from his party’s existing rhetoric — was that the system simply didn’t work. And if the system doesn’t work, the natural flow of logic then suggests, you must either work around the system or combat it.

On Monday, Peña was arrested by police in New Mexico for allegedly orchestrating a plot to shoot at the homes of various Democratic officials in the state: county commissioners, state legislators. In an interview, the chief of police in Albuquerque pointed at Peña’s election-fraud theories as a motivation for the alleged plot.

“The individual that we’re charging believed in that conspiracy,” Chief Harold Medina said. “He did believe that his election was unfair and he did escalate and resort to violence as a means to find justice.”

Since the 2020 election — and particularly since the riot at the Capitol in January 2021 — federal authorities have repeatedly warned about the prospect of violence stemming from an embrace of election-fraud conspiracy theories.

In mid-August 2021, for example, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released an advisory warning about terroristic threats stemming from Trump’s false claims about fraud and, specifically, about the idea being promoted by Trump allies like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell that Trump might somehow be reinstated.

“Some conspiracy theories associated with reinstating former President Trump have included calls for violence if desired outcomes are not realized,” it read.

Less than a week later, Floyd Ray Roseberry was arrested on Capitol Hill after threatening to trigger a bomb that would destroy multiple square blocks of Washington. In videos posted to Facebook, Roseberry repeated false claims about the 2020 election and claimed that Trump would be reinstated as president after Labor Day.

As the midterm elections approached, DHS maintained its concerns about fraud-related conspiracies. In February 2022 a bulletin pointed out that fraud-related conspiracy theories were still spreading online and that similar arguments had led to acts of violence. After the midterms, another noted the ongoing risk of violence from those offering baseless objections to the results.

“[S]ome social media users have sought to justify the use of violence in response to perceptions that the midterm elections were fraudulent,” it read, “citing technical difficulties at voting sites and delays in certifications.”

About a week later, one of the alleged attacks on a legislator in New Mexico was carried out.

In the days after his election loss, Peña repeatedly claimed that the election was rigged against him. More than once, he shared a nonsensical article from the conspiracy-theory site Gateway Pundit claiming that the results were tainted by fraud — based on a report (presented in Comic Sans) from a group linked to notorious election-fraud conspiracy theory promoter David Clements. He also shared a photo of himself in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.

Until he is found or pleads guilty, Peña should be presumed innocent of the charges that he led the effort to engage in acts of violence against Democratic officials in New Mexico. But if he was involved in that effort, it fits with the pattern observed by law enforcement.

Peña didn’t trust the results of the 2020 election or his own election two years later. So, Albuquerque police allege, he “did escalate and resort to violence as a means to find justice.” Or, in the words of DHS, he may allegedly have “sought to justify the use of violence in response to perceptions that the midterm elections were fraudulent.”

The toxic fruit of opportunistically disparaging valid systems.