We Know You Know Were Lying Trump
Guest Essay
Why Millions Think It Is Trump Who Cannot Tell a Lie
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
Why is Donald Trump's big lie so hard to ignominy?
This has been a live question for more than than a year, just inside it lies another: Do Republican officials and voters actually believe Trump'south merits that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election by corrupting ballots — the aforementioned ballots that put so many Republicans in office — and if they do believe information technology, what are their motives?
A December 2021 University of Massachusetts-Amherst survey institute hitting links between attitudes on race and immigration and disbelief in the integrity of the 2020 ballot.
According to the poll, two-thirds of Republicans, 66 percentage, agreed that "the growth of the number of immigrants to the U.S. means that America is in danger of losing its civilization and identity," and the same percentage of Republicans are convinced that "the Democratic Political party is trying to replace the electric current electorate with voters from poorer countries effectually the earth."
Post-obit up on the UMass survey, four political scientists — Jesse Rhodes, Raymond La Raja, Tatishe Nteta and Alexander Theodoridis — wrote in an essay posted on The Washington Mail'due south Monkey Muzzle:
Divisions over racial equality were closely related to perceptions of the 2020 presidential election and the Capitol set on. For example, among those who agreed that white people in the United States have advantages based on the colour of their peel, 87 percentage believed that Joe Biden's victory was legitimate; amid neutrals, 44 per centum believed it was legitimate; and among those who disagreed, merely 21 percent believed it was legitimate. 70 percent of people who agreed that white people enjoy advantages considered the events of Jan. half-dozen to be an coup; 26 per centum of neutrals described it that way; and only 10 percent who disagreed did and then, while 80 percent of this concluding group chosen it a protest. And while 70 percent of those who agreed that white people savor advantages blamed Trump for the events of Jan. half-dozen, only 34 percentage of neutrals did, and a mere 9 percent of those who disagreed did.
According to experts I asked, Republican elected officials who either affirm Donald Trump'southward claim that the 2020 election was decadent or refuse to call Trump out base their stance on a sequence of rationales.
Mike McCurry, President Beak Clinton'south press secretary, sees the origin of one rationale in demographic trends:
I believe much of the polarization and discord in national politics comes from changing demographics. Robert Jones of P.R.R.I. writes about this in "The End of White Christian America," and I think this is a source of many politico-cultural divisions and plays out in balloter politics. There is an America ("American dream") that many whites were privileged to know growing up, and it now seems to exist evaporating or at to the lowest degree condign subservient to other cultural ideals and norms. So that spurs anxiety, and it is translated to the language and posture of politics.
McCurry went on:
I retrieve otherwise well-meaning Thou.O.P. senators who flinch when information technology comes to common sense and serving the common skilful practice so because they accept no vocabulary or perspective which allows them to deal with the underlying changes in society. They experience the changes, they know constituents whom they otherwise like who experience the changes, but they cannot effigy out how to lower the level of malaise.
Some maintain that another rationale underpinning submission to the prevarication is that it signals loyalty to the larger bourgeois crusade.
Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia, pointed out in an email that acceptance of Trump's fake claims gives Republican politicians a way of bridging the gap between a powerful network of donors and elites who back free trade capitalism and the crucial bloc of white working-class voters seeking trade protectionism and continued government funding of Social Security and Medicare:
Embracing the big lie is an empty arroyo to populism for a lot of these politicians. It allows them to cast their rivals, and the system itself, every bit corrupt — to cash in on that widespread sentiment — and to cast themselves as exceptions to the rule. It allows them to portray themselves as allies of the people just without actually changing anything in terms of the policies they advocate for, in terms of how they do business organisation.
For those Republican leaders, al-Gharbi continued, "who are the swamp, or could be reasonably construed as such, information technology is important to create an apparent distance from the establishment. Flirting with the big lie is a expert way of doing so."
Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted in an email that "fright of balloter retribution from Trump — and from Republican voters — drives Senate M.O.P. reluctance to break with Trump."
The sometime president, she continued,
has succeeded in reshaping the One thousand.O.P. as his party. This electoral dynamic applies in spades to Republicans' unwillingness to challenge Trump over the Jan. six insurrection — or, like Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, to back downwardly from their initial criticisms. It seems every bit if fealty to Trump's culling version of the events of Jan. 6 is the litmus test for Republicans.
The underlying policy agreements between Republican incumbents and Trump reinforces these straightforward concerns over re-election, in Folder'southward view:
For all of Trump's nativist clearing, trade, and America Starting time views, he was lock step with Republicans on cut taxes and regulations and stacking the courts with young conservatives. In that light, certainly while Trump was in office, Senate Republicans held their noses on any anti-democratic beliefs and stuck with Trump to secure the policies they craved.
Along similar lines, Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, observes that Republican elected officials make their calculations based on the goal of political survival:
What mayhap looks like commonage derangement to many outside the political party ranks is really just raw political calculation. The all-time strategy for regaining congressional control is to keep Trump and his supporters within the party tent, and the merely way to do that is to go forth with his myths in order to get along with him.
This approach, Cain continued, "is the path of to the lowest degree political resistance. Trump in 2016 demonstrated that he could win the presidency" while rejecting calls to attain out to minorities, by targeting a constituency that is "predominantly white and lxxx pct conservative." Because of its homogeneity, Cain continued, "the Republican Party is much more than unified than the Democrats at the moment."
While there was considerable agreement amidst the scholars and strategists whom I contacted that Republican politicians consciously develop strategies to deal with what many privately recognize is a lie, there is less understanding on the thinking of Republican voters.
Lane Cuthbert, along with his UMass colleague Alex Theodoridis, asked in an op-ed in The Washington Post:
How could the "big lie" campaign convince and then many Republicans that Trump won an ballot he so clearly lost? Some observers wonder whether these beliefs are genuine or just an instance of "expressive responding," a term social scientists use to mean respondents are using a survey item to register a feeling rather than limited a real belief.
In their own analysis of poll data, Cuthbert and Theodoridis concluded that most Republicans are truthful believers in Trump's lie:
Apparently, Republicans are reporting a 18-carat belief that Biden's election was illegitimate. If anything, a few Republicans may, for social desirability reasons, be using the "I'm non sure" choice to hibernate their true belief that the election was stolen.
Al-Gharbi sharply disputes this conclusion:
Well-nigh Republican voters probable don't believe in the big prevarication. But many would still profess to believe it in polls and surveys and would back up politicians who brand similar professions considering these professions serve as a sign of disobedience against the prevailing elites. They serve as signs of group solidarity and commitment.
Poll respondents, he connected,
oftentimes requite the factually wrong reply about empirical matters not considering they don't know the empirically right answer but because they don't want to requite political provender to their opponents with respect to their preferred policies. And when one takes downward the temperature on these political stakes, again, ofttimes the differences on the facts also disappear.
1 way to exam how much people actually believe something, al-Gharbi wrote, "is to await out for yawning gaps between rhetoric and behaviors." The fact that roughly 2,500 people participated in the January. 6 insurrection suggests that the overwhelming majority of Republicans do non believe the election was stolen, no matter what they tell pollsters, in al-Gharbi's view. He connected:
If huge shares of the country, 68 percent of G.O.P. voters, plus fair numbers of independents and nonvoters, literally believed that we were in a moment of existential crisis and the election had been stolen and the future was at stake, why is information technology that only a couple thousand could muster the enthusiasm to show up and protest at the Capitol? In a earth where 74 1000000 voted for Trump and more than two-thirds of these (i.eastward., more than l million people, roughly one out of every five adults in the U.S.) actually believed that the other party had illegally seized ability and plan to employ that power to damage people like themselves, the events of Jan. 6 would probable have played out much, much differently.
Whatever the motivation, Isabel V. Sawhill, a Brookings senior fellow, warned that Republican leaders and voters could be caught in a vicious bike:
There may be a dynamic at work here in which an opportunistic strategy to delight the Trump base of operations has solidified that base of operations, making it all the more than difficult to take a stance in opposition to "any Trump wants." It's a Catch-22. To change the direction of the country requires staying in power, merely staying in power requires satisfying a public, a large share of whom has lost faith in our institutions, including the mainstream media and the autonomous procedure.
Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, noted in an email that the large lie fits into a larger Republican strategy: "In an economically diff lodge, it is important for the conservative economic party to apply culture war politics to win elections considering they are unlikely to win based on their economical agenda."
"At that place are a number of reasons why some Republican elites who were once anti-Trump became loyal to Trump," Grumbach said. He continued:
Outset is the threat of being primaried for failing to sufficiently oppose immigration or the Democratic Party, a procedure that ramped upwards first in the Gingrich era and and then more than so during the Tea Political party era of the early 2010s. Second is that Republican elites who were once anti-Trump learned that the Republican-aligned network of interest groups and donors — Flim-flam News, titans of extractive and low-wage industry, the Northward.R.A., evangelical organizations, etc. — would by and large remain intact despite sometimes initially signaling that they would withhold entrada contributions or exit the coalition in opposition to Trump.
Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, took a unlike tack, arguing that Republican members of Congress, especially those in the Senate, would like nothing better than to have the big prevarication excised from the contemporary political mural:
I disagree with the premise that many senators buy into the big lie. Congressional Republicans' stance toward the events of Jan. 6 is to move on beyond them. They do not spend time rebuking activists who question the 2020 outcome, simply they as well exercise non endorse such views, either. With rare exception, congressional Republicans do not requite floor speeches questioning the 2020 elections. They do not need hearings to investigate ballot fraud.
Instead, Lee argued, "Many Republican voters still back up and dear Donald Trump, and Republican elected officials desire to be able to go on to represent these voters in Washington." The bottom line, she continued, is that
Republican elected officials want and demand to hold the Republican Party together. In the U.South. two-political party system, they come across the Republican Political party as the only realistic vehicle for battling Democrats' control of political offices and for opposing the Biden agenda. They see a focus on the 2020 elections as a lark from the most important problems of the nowadays: fighting Democrats' "tax and spend" initiatives and winning back Republican control of Congress in the 2022 midterms.
Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, argues that
Trump lives past Machiavelli's famous maxim that fright is a better foundation for loyalty than beloved. G.O.P. senators don't fright Trump personally; they fear his followers. Republican politicians are then cowed past Trump'due south supporters, you can almost hear them moo.
Trumpism, Begala wrote in an email, "is more of a cult of personality, which makes fealty to the Love Leader even more important. How else do you explain sixteen Thou.O.P. senators who voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006 all refusing to even allow it to be debated in 2022?"
Begala compares Senator Mitch McConnell'south views of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 — "America's history is a story of ever-increasing freedom, hope and opportunity for all. The Voting Rights Human action of 1965 represents one of this country's greatest steps forrard in that story. Today I am pleased the Senate reaffirmed that our country must continue its progress towards becoming a society in which every person, of every background, can realize the American dream" — to McConnell's stance now: "This is not a federal issue; it ought to exist left to the states."
Republican politicians, in Begala'south cess,
have deluded themselves into thinking that Trump and the big lie tin can work for them. The reality is the opposite: Republican politicians work for Trump and the big lie. And they may exist powerless to stop it if and when Trump uses it to undermine the 2024 presidential results.
Information technology is at this point, Begala continued, "where leadership matters. Trump stokes bigotry, he sows division, he promotes racism, and when other G.O.P. politicians fail to disavow Trump's divisiveness, they abet information technology. What a contrast to other Republican leaders in my lifetime."
Like Begala, Charles Stewart 3, a political scientist at M.I.T., was blunt in his assay:
At that place's generally a lack of nuance in because why Republican senators fail to carelessness Trump. Whereas Reagan spoke of the 11th Commandment, Trump destroyed it, along with many of the first 10. He is mean and vindictive and speaks to a set of supporters who are willing to take their free energy and animus to the polling place in the primaries — or at least, that'due south the worry. They are too motivated by racial animus and by Christian millennialism.
These voters, co-ordinate to Stewart,
are non a majority of the Republican Political party, but they are motivated by fear, and fear is the greatest motivator. Even if a senator doesn't share those views — and I don't retrieve most exercise — they feel they can't alienate these folks without stoking a fight. Why stoke a fight? Few politicians enter politics looking to be a martyr. Mainstream Republican senators may be overestimating their ability to keep the extremist genie in the bottle, but they accept no option right now if they intend to continue in function.
Philip Bobbitt, a professor of constabulary at Columbia and the University of Texas, argued in an email that Republican acceptance of Trump's falsehoods is a reflection of the ability Trump has over members of the party:
It'due south the very fact that they know Trump'south claims are ludicrous — that is the betoken: Similar other bullies, he amuses himself and solidifies his authority by humiliating people, and what tin be more humiliating than compelling people to publicly announce their endorsements of something they know and everyone else knows to exist false?
Thomas Mann, a Brookings senior beau, fabricated the case in an email that Trump has transformed the Republican Party so that membership at present precludes having "a moral sense: honesty, empathy, respect for one's colleagues, wisdom, institutional loyalty, a willingness to put state alee of party on existential matters, an openness to irresolute conditions."
Instead, Isle of man wrote:
the current, Trump-led Republican Party allows no room for such considerations. Representative Liz Cheney's honest patriotism would be no more welcome among Senate Republicans than House Republicans. Fifty-fifty those current Republican senators whose earlier careers indicated a moral sense — Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Richard Burr, Roy Blunt, Lisa Murkowski, Robert Portman, Ben Sasse, Richard Shelby — take felt obliged to pull their punches in the confront of the big prevarication and attempted coup.
Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at Due north.Y.U., describes the danger of this political dynamic:
In capturing the political party, Trump perfectly embodied its ethnonationalist and disciplinarian tendencies and delivered it concrete results — fifty-fifty if his policy stances were not always perfectly aligned with political party orthodoxy. Equally a result, the Republican Party and Trumpism accept become fused into a single entity — one that poses serious threats to the stability of the United States.
The unwillingness of Republican leaders to challenge Trump's relentless lies, for whatever reason — for political survival, for mobilization of whites opposed to minorities, to back-scratch favor, to feign populist sympathies — is every bit consequential as or more so than actually believing the lie.
If Republican officials and their voters are willing to swallow an enormous and highly consequential untruth for political gain, they have taken a first step toward becoming willing allies in the corrupt manipulation of future elections.
In that sense, the big lie is a precursor to more dangerous threats — threats that are plausible in ways that less than a decade agone seemed inconceivable. The capitulation to and appeasement of Trump by Republican leaders is actually setting upward even worse possibilities than what we've lived through so far.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/opinion/trump-big-lie.html
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