Discouraging news from a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll on the first anniversary of a shameful day in American history, the Jan. 6 insurrection.
According to the results, only 9 percent of Donald Trump’s voters now believe that President Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election. Last January, 13 percent believed Biden won.
This, after the vote was certified state by state; after all Trump’s legal challenges were found to lack merit or were decided against him, sometimes by judges he appointed; and after numerous investigations, including one set into motion by pro-Trump forces, found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have impacted the outcome of the election.
Nevertheless, Trump’s Big Lie has not only taken root, but has actually grown in the 12 months since a pro-Trump faction attempted to subvert the Democratic process by storming the Capitol building.
And if many of the insurrectionists looked more like clueless tourists wandering around the rotunda, well, there were enough others with more nefarious goals. This latter crew broke down doors and shattered windows, tussled with Capitol police, flew the Confederate flag, threatened to harm members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence, and contributed to five deaths.
Be that as it may, the Big Lie is durable because it is simple and unassailable by logic.
The gist of the lie is this: Trump won, Biden lost, and the official count is wrong because of large numbers of mail-in ballots, rigging of the voting machines or thousands of votes flown in from China. (Remember the fruitless hunt for bamboo?)
As each of these explanations is shown to lack merit, supporters simply move to the next, then the next, then the next. When they get to the end and still lack evidence, that’s proof that the conspiracy runs even deeper. Or that the godless liberal media are lying when outlet after outlet debunks each myth, providing carefully sourced explanations.
After all, these Trumpian acolytes sneer, there is no way that Trump lost. Just look at all the support he had.
I’ll never deny that Trump supporters are louder than Biden supporters, or that they haven’t invested more of themselves into backing their candidate. Trumpism was and is closer to a cult than a political movement, and deprogramming cult members is notoriously challenging and not always successful.
Cult comparisons aside, at this point espousing a belief in the Big Lie is just so much virtue (or vice) signalling for many. It’s an easy way to establish loyalty, and even Republicans who should and probably do know better — especially ones running for office in 2022 — have to tiptoe carefully around this constructed unreality lest they run afoul of voters.
Bernie Moreno is an example. In November 2020, the Ohio businessman tweeted that conservatives had to accept the election’s results. He even congratulated Biden and Kamala Harris. Those tweets were deleted when he became a candidate for the Ohio Senate. In recent ads, he states that the election was stolen.
I’m convinced that most of the 91 percent of Trump voters who say that their candidate won really don’t believe it, not in their heart of hearts. But they can never admit it, not even to themselves. After all, most Flat Earthers don’t really think somebody can sail off the edge of the planet; literal belief in a pancake model of the world is unnecessary as long as one pledges allegiance to the wackadoodle theory in a figurative sense.
The same is true with the 2020 election. As long as you state that Trump won, then you belong — ”gabba gabba we accept you we accept you one of us.”
Sadly, while the grueling yet necessary work of the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6th Attack on the United States Capitol trudges on, Trump loyalists in the GOP continue their own inexorable mission of eviscerating state voting protections and financing cronies for state secretary of state offices. This way, the next attack on democracy will be carried out not by a violent mob storming the Capitol, but by men in suits and ties, operating under the veneer of authority, rejecting vote tallies unless they favor the candidate whose party already bought and owns them.
The visible parts of the Jan. 6 insurrection were quintessential Trump — poorly conceived, mostly flash, little substance.
But like all Trumpian ploys, the spectacle diverted the eye while even worse chicanery occurred elsewhere. And it still is.
Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig
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