quote:

Former President Donald Trump has been telling people he thinks he'll return to the White House as the sitting president by August, the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted on Tuesday.

Haberman, who broke some of the biggest stories of the Trump administration and has been covering him for decades, added that Trump had been "laser focused" on election audits in states whose results he is still trying to overturn.

The anti-democratic conspiracy theory has been bubbling up in fringe conservative media for several months. It has no basis under the Constitution or any legitimate legal framework.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has been a prominent proponent of the theory.

The former Trump attorney Sidney Powell also floated the idea at a QAnon conference over the weekend.

The anticipation of a Trump reinstatement on a certain date could spread further among the most dedicated Trump supporters. The calls to help overturn the 2020 election on January 6, for example, gained steam through a pro-Trump bus tour by a fringe group and led to the insurrection at the Capitol.

Lindell has said August is when he would go to the Supreme Court to present evidence he's acquired that would be so convincing that the justices would be forced to reject the 2020 election result.

A podcast from the former Trump advisor Steve Bannon has amplified the conspiracy theory, as Lindell and others have gone on the show to promote it with minimal pushback.