I don’t know how, when or why this goes away, and it’s hard to grasp the level of dysfunction it embeds in our little experiment in democratic/republican self-government, but …
… recent polls continue to show that more than two-thirds of Republicans believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Democrats.
Those who believe that are wrong, and cannot produce any credible evidence to back up their belief. Such “evidence” as exists has been in the courts and rejected, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided, by 6-3 (with three Republican appointees voting to take the case, and three not to) not to hear the case, allowing the official election result to stand.
That’s old news, but the latest polling, from SSRS for CNN in late April, indicates that – while a huge majority of Democrats, a solid two-thirds majority of independents, and a solid overall majority of Americans believes the Joe Biden’s election victory was legitimate — two-thirds of Republicans either believe or suspect that Trump’s victory was somehow stolen. (And by far the bulk of those, comprising 60% of all Republicans in the sample, took the harder line, saying there is “solid evidence” that the election was stolen from Trump.
(The poll results did not go into the nature of the solid evidence. The poll apparently asked a follow-up of those who said Biden’s victory was illegitimate, whether they considered that view more of a suspicion, or whether it was based on “solid evidence” that Biden’s victory was not legitimate.)
Based on that poll result, Washington Post columnist Philip Bump wrote last week:
“If you don’t deal with this every day, it’s hard to overstate how damaging this claim has been. Those of you who are not interstellar astronauts are obviously familiar with the events of Jan. 6, the riot at the U.S. Capitol that stemmed directly from Trump’s insistences and advocacy. But you may not be familiar with how far the tendrils of these claims about rampant voter fraud reach, wrapping themselves around scores of unfounded claims and a library’s worth of erroneous statistical claims, unsupported memes and misguided testimonials.”
There have been extremely close elections in the past. The Bush v. Gore (2000) case went all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s still quite possible to believe that the court got it wrong, but the Florida result was so close that it’s roughly impossible to know, and the country moved on. The 1876 Rutherford B. Hayes-Samuel Tilden election had to be decided by a special commission, and included a side deal that if the southern states would accept Hayes’ election, the federal troops, who were still stationed in the post-Civil War south, would be removed.
But this was not a particularly close election. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 51.3 to 46.9 percent in the national popular vote. And to believe in the “steal” theory, you have to believe that several states, including states where the elections were run by Republican officials, had been stolen for Biden.
The next paragraph, from the Phillip Bump column I cited above, explains that the belief that the election was stolen is based on …
“… a hydra of misinformation in which slicing off one false claim simply spurs Trump’s base to elevate a dozen more. The effort to combat this misinformation is almost necessarily insufficient in the face of a fervency that, for many people, is as essential to their belief system as the idea that he didn’t lose is essential to Trump’s self-esteem. For every article that The Washington Post writes making clear that a purported piece of evidence is untrue or incorrect, there’s an ocean of right-wing media outlets and personalities willing to tear it down or redirect people somewhere else.”
This is creepy. If this is the new normal (and I’m plenty worried that it might be), I fear for the future of the American experiment in democracy.
At the very least, this shows that the Republican Party is not a political party anymore, but has morphed into a personality cult. It also shows that its commitment to the rule of law and the functioning of a representative government has gone out the window. What is the Party’s purpose now? Does it exist solely to feed the ego and the bank account of a boor who wouldn’t last two weeks at any job not bankrolled by his father? Is it to maintain power for its own sake? Have they abandoned any pretense of ideas?
No, this is not good for American democracy. By giving in to the temptation of authoritarianism, the United States is rapidly ceding its moral leadership or example for the rest of the world.
When I was in high school, we had a civics textbook that made the point about the American norm of the peaceful transition of power in an interesting way. President Johnson’s accession to the presidency was contrasted with the transition less than a year later from Khrushchev to Brezhnev and Kosygin in the USSR. In the US, there were no tanks taking to the streets, not “dusk to dawn” curfews, and no media blackout. In short, it was a quick, almost routine but certainly peaceful process. I guess we can kiss that pattern good bye.
You have that exactly right. It is a personality cult, betrayal of what the party should stand for. Every day the gop reinforces the wisdom of leaving the party.
Reinforcing belief in Trump’s Big Lie is the bridge to the next step of the ongoing anti-democratic campaign: freeing themselves from the restraints of respecting certified state election results with which they disagree. Hell, 147 House Repubs already voted to reject the certified 2020 results of several states, for no coherent reason whatsoever (other than that Biden won them).
This rejection is being coupled with the turning of a blind eye to the Jan 6th Insurrection, as well as the second impeachment of Trump over it. Those elected Repubs who publicly objected to Trump’s incitement of the revolt are now being purged. The strategy is about as clear as it could be.
“essential to their belief system”
We have our own little 3rd Reich. They can’t explain it, they can’t rationalize it, they can’t logically discuss it, they can’t verbalize it, they can’t support it (W/O going to the right wing propaganda cesspool), they are afraid to talk about it, but they are in it to their eye balls. That old well to do white guy grievance against the world. A very sad time for America, and a political party that supports this BS, actually they can be called traitorous, they are fundamentally supporting the overthrow of the governemnt based on 100% pure unadulterated T****S–t.
I thought maybe when Trump’s lawyer and some of the other defendants in the defamation lawsuits admitted it was all false and obviously so, that it would stop this nonsense. Not so much.
The Eisenhower Republicans, who were in charge when I was a boy, must be rolling over and over and over in their graves as they see what has become of their Party.
The R political action to the “stolen election” is to package voter suppression as election security. Pass these and 2020 would have never happened and the “rightful winner” would still be in the White House. Yet not a one of these guys will offer a reason for the apparent total failure of the Constitution to provide a proper solution when an injustice like this occurs.
Trump was about 1 and 60 in his legal appeals. Given the true believers absolute confidence in the wrong being perpetrated here they must certainly see the Constitution and the Judiciary failing them. And they can’t blame it on liberal judges: They have put that problem behind them.
What happens if all these voting measures fail to do as they expect and they find themselves in this mess again?
I am sure we will soon see their thoughtful suggestions for Constitutional remedies.
Or maybe they know they lost fair and square, the Constitution and Judiciary worked as it should. And they are just doing what they are excused of: Trumpism can’t win an election on candidates and ideas so they just need to institutionalize stealing elections while telling us what great patriots the are.
And:
Every time any election doubting politician is interviewed they need to be asked:
“Why did the Constitution and the Judiciary fail to right this perceived wrong?”
And:
Pelosi needs to get to an agreement on the commission to investigate January 6 ASAP. Kevin McCarthy and others definitely do not want to be subpoenaed to testify where they must tell the truth in their role as first hand witnesses and will do their all to not have an independent investigation with subpoena power.
The need never better summarized than by open letter to congress by DC Cop Michael Fantone:
https://twitter.com/EricFlackTV/status/1390001051772796930/photo/1
“Added to that, the 40-year-old officer wrote, is the “emotional anxiety” he said he feels when people deny that the insurrection that left one Capitol Police officer and four others dead was violent.”
I did not anticipate one day channeling Liz Cheney:
“More than 60 state and federal courts, including multiple Trump-appointed judges, have rejected the former president’s arguments, and refused to overturn election results. That is the rule of law; that is our constitutional system for resolving claims of election fraud.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/05/liz-cheney-republican-party-turning-point/
I think it’s hard for those of us in the reality-based world to comprehend what’s happened on the other side.
Back in the 80’s, the Republican Party (at the time of Newt Gingrich’s contract [on] America, and Jerry Falwell’s “moral majority”),…
the Republican Party was taken over, from the Precinct Caucuses up,…
by ignorant, belligerent, bigoted, blow hards, (mostly evangelical “christians”)…
who ran the moderates out of leadership.
Rush Limbaugh on talk radio and Rupert Murdoch with weasel news did their parts, as well,…
ultimately convincing those ignorant, belligerent, bigoted, blow hards,…
that the only problem with all their ideas (which were formerly regarded as ridiculously out of touch with reality),…
was that they’d never really been tried.
All of this culminated in the election of the ultimate ignorant, belligerent, bigoted, blow hard – Donald Trump.
AT LAST! This would be the big chance for all those half baked, belligerent, bigoted ideas to hold sway,…
which would fix the entire universe!
Only it didn’t.
Partly because of COVID, but for an entire hose of other reasons as well, the whole thing crashed and burned.
We’re still waiting to see if what’s now smoldering just beneath the surface is going to flare up and burn down our entire Representative Democracy (as it nearly did on January 6th).
But the situation for our “conservative” friends is the same as with all people who suddenly find that they have everything they ever wanted and they’re in charge,…
and NOTHING works out the way they’ve been telling other people for decades it absolutely would.
If you’re strong and mature enough, you face up to the reality that you must have been wrong about a few things and begin the work of discovering what those things were and how you might change,…
or you can continue to insist that you were NOT wrong and that the (very predictably disastrous) results of the things you did of your own volition,…
are the fault of everyone and everything else, even if you have to enter into the realm of total delusion to do so.
That’s where our “conservative” Republican friends have gone;…
into the realm of total delusion,…
because they lack the ego strength to honestly evaluate the situation,…
face up to their part in the disaster they caused,…
and seek to learn whatever they didn’t know;…
whatever prevented them from seeing it coming and avoiding it.
At this point, it’s as if having captained The Titanic, they’re now claiming there was no iceberg,…
and the ship didn’t actually sink.
The Question now is whether they’ll be able to find their way back to reality,…
and how many of them will do so.
The box that the R’s are in is that the D’s have been drifting towards to center — that is, to the right. Biden may be reversing that a bit, but more in terms of specific actions than in policy.
This means that to maintain a distance from the D’s, the R’s must shift further right, but this takes them further from the main stream of American voters, so they can’t win elections honestly.
Their only hope is to come up with a consistent set of actionable policies that are more conservative (in the traditional sense) than the D’s and that would appeal to more than a small subset of American voters. This requires more than McConnell’s ‘D’oh, N’oh’.
An excellent point made in your linked article is that due to sloppy or nonexistent procedure by the “Cyber Ninjas”, the chain of custody for these ballots has been completely destroyed. The downside, of course, is that because of that, those running the “audit” can now produce pretty much anything they claim is an actual ballot, and there is no longer any way to prove either that it is or it isn’t. Which won’t – of course – make any difference to the true believers who are foaming at the mouth for “actual evidence” of fraudulent ballots.
This is going to keep getting uglier and uglier.
“Uglier and uglier…”
Yup. They have crossed the Rubicon.
If the past four years did not clue you in to where Trumplicans were trying to take this Country, you only had to watch last weekend’s PBS Documentary, ‘The Rise of the Nazis’ to realize the Republican game plan.
Trump drew out all of the cockroaches. They are everywhere!! He controls them with threats, intimidation, and dossiers on each one. They scurry around like crazed zombies, desperately trying to appease their psychopathic ‘leader’. In real life roaches can be controlled with certain practices and products, driven back out of sight if not actually exterminated. In this real life political scenario the only thing that will drive the REPS back is TRUTH..hard driving truth back in their faces 24/7, by a vast number of mature realists not afraid to call them on their childish but oh so dangerous nonsense. I see increasing numbers of strong folks standing up to them daily, calling them out, shutting off their mics, writing opposing letters to the Editor. But to-date there has still not been the high numbers necessary to form a solid wall of resistance. I get it: 4 years of Trump’s literal craziness, plus Covid, has been a lot. But THEY think because we’re all weary we are weak and can’t or won’t fight back. Now is the time to rise up against them! It feels over-whelming; it isn’t. It can be exhausting, and it’s certainly not fun. But the stakes are MASSIVE and so must the reaction be. So stand up, gird your loins, carry cheat cards w you, and HIT BACK, people! Until they fall back and the sane & ethical & learned re-gain control. Do it for your kids & grandkids. Cuz not a one of us should be okay with them forced to live under a Fascist regime. And that is precisely what the Trump REPS are trying to force upon us all. Be clear on that. (((SHUDDER)))
Well, of course most Repubs “haven’t given up on thinking the 2020 election was stolen”. Why would they?
Their “news” outlets of choice haven’t given up on it, or debunked or rejected the manufactured “evidence” Bump cites; they’re the carriers of it! Instead the Repub base is breathlessly watching “reporting” on the (obviously illegitimate) partisan “audit” of a single (Blue) country in AZ.
Their elected Repub leaders certainly haven’t distanced themselves from their failed ex-president or denounced his Big Lie. Instead the Repub party apparatus is embracing Trumpolini more strongly than ever, deferring to him as though he is some strategic savior of the party, and cleaving unto him as though he was a rejected messiah. Indeed, those last remaining voices of reality in the party (such as President Cheney’s daughter!) who are saying that Trump’s Big Lie is indeed a Big Lie are being removed from positions of leadership.
Give this reality, it’s extremely likely Trump will be the 2024 nominee, based on what we are currently seeing. There are no realistic options for the Repub party, especially given the self-abasing fealty they are now according him. Of course, the anti-democratic policies Repubs are now undertaking at the state level across the nation will benefit not only Trump, but any future Repub candidate seeking to eke out the (now standard) popular vote-losing electoral college “win”….
We who accept reality and truth are always told to try to talk, calmly and without accusations or condescension, to those Republicans who cannot accept that Trump lost the 2020 election, or that any other facet of Trump’s performance as President has been noxious. It’s an impossible task. They refuse to listen, and when–as a CNN reporter did, respectfully but insisting–someone asks that they present their “proof” they demur and huffily state that because CNN can’t be trusted they won’t tell CNN (or whomever) what “proof” they have. (This is irrational, but that’s what they do.)
In other words, push these delusional Trumpites gently to the wall on his Big Lie and other Trump fantasies and they just huff and shut down.
That’s because they KNOW they are believing and re-telling that Big Lie. But they don’t want to face it. Same thing with Trump himself: As with the whole COVID thing, he knows the truth but keeps telling a Big Lie because that’s his preference. They are all choosing to perpetuate lies. Choosing it.
And that is the real danger. Not Trump so much, but those millions of Americans who simply cannot, will not, live in our shared factual reality. They are hiding from the terror of the probable destruction of the Earth, for example, through human-caused global warming. They are hiding from the truly uncomfortable fact that whites are no longer the majority in America. They are hiding from the fact that robotics and AI will take their jobs within the next 10-20 years, even those with solidly middle-class professional jobs.
They are incapable of facing the future, with its changes. Change is hard. But it’s these people, not Trump, that are most worrisome because they will not make that big effort to fact truth.
Part of it is delay discounting.
People tend to choose a small immediate reward over a larger delayed reward, and accept a small immediate reward even when it leads to a larger delayed cost.
According to a litigation tracker, Trump is currently facing 13 lawsuits and criminal investigations.
They span the gamut from defamation, potential tax crimes, corporate scams, insurance fraud, conspiracy, violating DC criminal codes and the Voting Rights Act, to misuse of inauguration funds and
inheritance fraud by Mary Trump. One can only hope that this is the tip of a massive iceberg headed straight for Mar-a-Lago.
Trump doesn’t have that many years left given his state of health.
He’ll try to stall things in court for the rest of his worthless life.
If the 85% who believed the big lie right after the inauguration is now down to 70%: I’ll take 5% per month if it is sustainable. Even half that gets Trumpsters down to a whining 30% or so by next Summer and the ramp up to 2022 mid terms. Nobody is of the school of thought:
“Maybe I misjudged Donald Trump and I agree with him after all”
It is all an annoying and noisy down hill from here for the gradually deserting Trumpian Hoards.
Trump is like a decaying shopping mall: when critical mass is lost all the store fronts will go empty very quickly. It will be interesting to see what the Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley stores will be selling in their new locations.
I suspect that anyone who believes the Big Lie as April 2021 will go to their graves believing it. There is basically nothing factual out there they haven’t already seen, and disbelieved. And the Righwing Noise Machine will be diligently throwing out even more manufactured “evidence” of “fraud” in the coming months; and that’s what TrueBelievers will be consuming, non-stop.
As for Trump himself, the only question is whether he decides he wants to run again in 2024. I can’t see either of his two ne’er-do-well sons trying to stop him. Maybe Melania? Anyway, if he runs, no Repub would dare oppose him for the nomination, it would be a suicide run. It’s Trumpolini’s party, as literally inconceivable as that seems….
Interesting to note that one of Liz Cheney’s complaints is that the official R data shows Trump losing ground in public approval and the data is suppressed and not generally shared with house R members so as not to tarnish the image of their hero.
One more example of the people being a lot smarter then their elected representatives…
In a discussion of escaping Minnesota winters, I said that if I ever had enough money to maintain two residences, I would head for Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, or a foreign country instead of spending the three cold months among the kind of people who sent the current crop of Trump cultists to Washington. Florida? Texas? No thanks!
And the same can be said, unfortunately, for Sherburne, Mille Lacs, Stearns, Benton, etc… Minnesota counties. Drive around and you see places where you swear there may still be dirt floors and a big and lasting Trump banner out front.
In the win lose matrix of life these folks pick:
1. I win you lose
2. I get zero, but you lose
3. I win, you get zero
4. I get zero, you get zero
5. I lose, you lose
6. I win you, you win (AKA Compromising)
It’s not who you help, it’s who you make lose…
Indeed! What I notice when I drive north, as I did to get my covid shots at Fairview’s Wyoming, MN clinic, or south through Faribault, is the series of right-wing billboards, especially anti-abortion messages and right-libertarian messages, such as “It’s the people that make Minnesota great, not the taxes.”