Facts Don’t Care About Trump’s Feelings

Hey, 

Greetings from Cedar City, Utah. I’m here for the OneUtah conference, which is really just a wonderful gathering of state and local officials, business and educational leaders, and the like. But all I really have to report is that Utah remains one of the most impressive—and impressively decent—places in America. Also, the Fair Jessica and I went on a really cool helicopter ride this morning. 

One downside of being here is that I don’t have a lot of time to write the G-File, so I’m going to skip some steps. Ramesh Ponnuru and Nick Cattogio have both written excellent columns on the sinister and corrupting role that the “stolen election” canard—and it is a canard—plays in Republican politics today. 

The steps I’m skipping can be summarized by a simple word that captures my opinion of both pieces: Ditto. 

Ramesh notes that elected Republicans constantly say they want to move on to other issues whenever asked whether they believe the 2020 election was stolen. But they find it difficult to do so because they refuse to answer the question honestly. “What’s absurd is not the question but the fact that it has to be asked,” Ramesh writes. Referring to Mike Johnson, he adds that all the speaker of the House “had to do to be able to move on to the topics he prefers was tell the truth, which can be done succinctly: Biden won. (He could have added an ‘unfortunately.’)”

Meanwhile, Nick writes the following about denying the results of the 2020 election:

It’s become the political equivalent of the riddle of the Sphinx: As in ancient times, woe to those who answer incorrectly.

For Republicans caught between Trump on the one hand and national swing voters on the other, the only safe-ish response is to dodge. That’s what Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton did on Meet the Press this past Sunday when the riddle was put to him. “Joe Biden was elected president in 2020,” he allowed—before quickly adding that “it was an unfair election in many ways” due to states changing their voting laws during the pandemic, Twitter suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story for a few days, and so on.

So does that mean Trump lost?, he was asked repeatedly. And repeatedly, he wouldn’t say. “Joe Biden was elected president” was as far as he would go.

Again, ditto. 

My own favorite recent example of Republicans dodging the question was in the vice presidential debate. Tim Walz asked J.D. Vance, point blank, about Trump: “Did he lose the 2020 election?”

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied huffily, and then he immediately asked, “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?”

This is focusing on the future? The bad thing that happened explicitly and uniquely because of Trump in the wake of the 2020 election is ancient history, according to Vance, but this semi-bogus thing Kamala Harris allegedly or theoretically did in “the wake of the 2020 COVID situation” is the future? How does that work? 

Anyway, other than the dittos, there are some points I’d like to add. 

The conventional wisdom on the Trumpy right is that Americans don’t care about the stolen election stuff in no small part because the anti-Trump left hasn’t shut up about it. Obviously, there’s some truth here. The conventional wisdom on the left is that the right doesn’t care about the stolen election stuff because they don’t care about democracy. I think there’s some truth to that among Trump and his inner circle, but I don’t think that’s as true about rank-and-file MAGA types or Republicans. They believe that Democrats cheated … somehow. They’re just not sticklers on the details. As Rudy Giuliani put it in 2021, “We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.” 

A lot of these voters don’t want to hear about how Trump is a threat to democracy, because they vaguely think Trump has a Christmas pony of a point somewhere amid all the manure he flings. But more to the point—or at least my point—I think many of them simply accept that Trump’s charges of election fraud are “fake but accurate,” to borrow a phrase, and the way the left explains its case just seems too hysterical, abstract, or self-serving to make a dent with them.  

The result is that people who believe Trump tried to steal the election—which he did—end up just asserting it, rather than arguing it. The people who believe the Democrats successfully stole the election do likewise. And everyone in their respective echo chambers nods along. These Sunday show appearances that Ramesh and Nick write about are so maddening precisely because Republicans are trying to maintain credibility with their echo chambers and with Trump, while also seeming reasonable. 

Anyway, I think it would be better if these interviewers stopped asking the guests to agree with the conclusion, but instead engaged with the actual facts more. This pro-forma approach—“will you say now that the election wasn’t stolen?” “Do you believe Joe Biden is the president?”—just let’s everyone play their own game. Also, it really needs to be emphasized that if Republicans actually believe what they’re saying they should be desperate to engage on the facts.  If you actually think the election was stolen by the Democrats and that the media helped cover it up, you should welcome such questions, not whine about them. 

My personal peeve is actually the best argument presented by Trump and his defenders. They argue that Democrats in places like Pennsylvania “exploited” COVID to make absentee voting easier and then—mumble-mumble—this made it easy for them to steal the election. The reason why this is their best argument is not just because the others are so stupid, but that the rules were violated in Pennsylvania. A court, not the legislature, changed them. And that’s not how it’s supposed to work. 

But that doesn’t prove the mumble-mumble part. First of all, there’s no evidence that these changes led to any significant fraud. Second, those changes aren’t synonymous with fraud. And, third, if it was so obvious these changes would be good for Democrats, why didn’t Pennsylvania Republicans complain about them at the time?

Moreover, even if you can demonstrate that these changes in Pennsylvania amounted to fraud—they don’t—how does that explain, say, Arizona, or Georgia? So many people seem to think there’s a transitive property to Pennsylvania’s (fictional) fraud. It’s as if somehow proving or merely asserting misdeeds in Pennsylvania somehow helps to make the case for misdeeds in Georgia and Arizona, two Republican-run states in 2020.  Whatever Democrat conspiracy you think occurred in Pennsylvania, even if proven, doesn’t get you far in establishing that Republican Govs. Brian Kemp and Doug Doocey were in on it. 

Still, none of this addresses the more basic problem that has been almost completely ignored by both sides. 

You know what other states changed their rules because of COVID? Well, it wasn’t just Pennsylvania. It wasn’t even the three or five swing states Trump lost. Republican-controlled states like Alaska, Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, Louisiana, Nebraska, and West Virginia, changed their absentee voting rules because of COVID. So did a lot of Democrat-run states. In fact, most states changed their rules to deal with the pandemic. You know why? Because there was a frick’n pandemic. 

I understand that some people are so mad about how COVID was handled they think anything done by anybody to combat it—save for Donald Trump—was illegitimate and nefarious. But, as legitimate as some complaints about the CDC or Fauci etc. might be, they don’t make election conspiracy theories more plausible. You know what does? Facts.

Trump and his enablers made it sound like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were outliers in how they changed the rules because they were run by Democrats. This made it possible to say, “See what the Democrats did to steal the election!”

That sounds plausible, so long as nobody responds, “Yeah, they did the same thing Republicans did in numerous states!” It’s true that Florida didn’t ease absentee voting rules for the pandemic. But that’s because the state had already made voting by mail super easy before the pandemic. 

In other words, what made most of those swing states special wasn’t how they changed the rules, but that they were decisive in Trump’s defeat. Trump didn’t care that Florida had massive numbers of absentee ballots—because he won Florida. But Pennsylvania? Can you believe how they used absentee ballots?! It’s an outrage!

In some ways this gives Trump World more credit than it deserves, because again, the “they changed the rules for COVID” argument is the very best argument the “Stop the Steal” people have offered. It’s still not good. But it’s much better than the other stuff about Italian satellites, blah-blah Facebook, Hugo Chavez, Arizona’s Sharpie pen scandal, North Korean fraudulent ballots, and Dinesh D’Souza’s embarrassingly stupid 2000 Mules BS.

Anyway, I guess I’m just old-fashioned. When people lie, they should be confronted with facts and be asked to explain them. Asking people to testify about what they believe—at least for this kind of thing—is a waste of time. Asking people to explain why they believe it, and to provide facts to back it up, is a better use of everyone’s time.