Republicans are already laying the groundwork to scream “rigged” in California if the results don’t hand them exactly what they want — and Megyn Kelly just said the quiet part out loud.

When you declare “no one is going to trust this outcome” if Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt don’t make the general election, you’re not defending democracy, you’re threatening it.

This is the GOP’s entire election philosophy now: “I only trust the result if my side wins.”

They were perfectly fine with slow counts, mail ballots, and late-breaking updates when those dynamics worked in their favor in red states, and they had no problem certifying results when Republicans came out on top.

But the second the numbers shift toward Democrats — exactly as expected in states like California that count masses of mail ballots after Election Day — suddenly it’s fraud, cheating, or some shadowy conspiracy.

They’re not even pretending to believe in the will of the voters anymore.

Instead, they’re leaning on manufactured chaos, baseless “stop the count” rhetoric, and Trump-style lies about cheating — the same playbook that’s been rejected in court over and over again.

If you only accept the legitimacy of an election when your guy wins, that’s not patriotism. That’s authoritarianism.

And here’s the thing: they’re turning to dishonesty, gerrymandering, and voter suppression precisely because they know they can’t win on the merit of their policies or their deeply unpopular legislation.

If your agenda is tax cuts for billionaires, bans on bodily autonomy, attacks on LGBTQ+ people, and dismantling voting rights, of course you don’t want a fair, high-turnout democracy — you want as few people voting as possible, in maps rigged to protect your power.

We need to stop treating this as just “partisan spin” and call it what it is: a coordinated effort to condition their base to reject any election they lose.

The answer isn’t to cave to their tantrums — it’s to loudly defend every legal vote, support officials doing the work of counting ballots in full, and call out this “I don’t trust the result unless I win” nonsense every single time it shows up.