The Big Lies
The Republican and Democratic parties agree that the 2020 Presidential election was dominated by a toxic and corrosive “Big Lie” that, unless exposed and rectified, has the potential to seriously undermine American democracy.
For Republicans that Big Lie is of course that disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president Donald Trump won a SACRED and decisive LANDSLIDE victory in the 2020 presidential election that was STOLEN by Democrats who hate democracy and will do anything to satiate their lust for power.
It does not matter to these folks that when Dominion, the folks who make many of the voting machines used in the 2020 presidential election, sued Sidney Powell for over a billion dollars for slandering their good name her defense centered on the idea that her claims about electoral malfeasance were so crazy and out there that “no reasonable person" would believe her claims were anything other than the deranged ramblings of a complete lunatic.
That’s an exaggeration, of course, but not by much. You know you are operating from a position of weakness when the best defense you can offer is that you’re so bonkers and out there that only someone out of touch with reality would believe your claims.
In her legal filing, Powell insisted, in court that "Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as 'wild accusations' and 'outlandish claims.' They are repeatedly labelled 'inherently improbable' and even 'impossible.' Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants' position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.”
Luckily for Powell, the vast majority of Republicans apparently fall under the category of not being reasonable because something like 76 percent of Republicans believe that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
It similarly does not matter to these people that even the crackpot, wildly unethical and half-mad lawyers cursed with challenging Biden’s victory acknowledged in court, if not in public, that there was no real legal basis for arguing that Trump won and that their legal maneuvers were performative rather than based in reality.
Then again, Trump has been laying the groundwork for claiming that there’s no way a man as universally popular and beloved as himself could possibly lose an election without massive fraud for a very long time.
Even when Trump won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote in 2016 he insisted that widespread electoral fraud had cost him a decisive popular vote victory. It wasn’t enough for Trump to win in defiance of expectations, conventional wisdom and common decency: he had to insist that he’s won both the electoral vote AND the popular vote that those sneaky Democrats robbed him of a sacred double victory.
At the time that struck me as petty even by Trump standards but in hindsight he was laying the groundwork to argue that he was such a popular and beloved figure, despite being easily the most hated man in America, that no defeat, no matter how seemingly concrete, could possibly be legitimate.
It did not matter to these folks that whenever The New York Times, CNN or The Washington Post reported on Trump’s electoral challenges they made sure to point out that there was no legitimate evidence whatsoever to support their claims.
After all, big Daddy Trump had taught them that anybody who criticized him was an enemy of the American people motivated exclusively by seething personal hatred for them. Any negative coverage of Trump was, by definition, FAKE NEWS to his supporters because how could anybody possibly have anything unflattering to say about him unless they were America-hating Communists with a personal vendetta against him?
Republicans feel strongly enough about the “theft" of Trump’s “sacred" electoral victory that they’ve introduced new laws in places like my home state of Georgia to encourage the “legitimate" votes of white people voting for Republicans and discourage the “illegitimate” votes of POC voting for Democrats.
The Democrats response to the 2020 presidential election similarly revolves around a poisonous and toxic “big lie”, only this time the massive fib in question is that Joe Biden cheated to win a 2020 election Trump would have won in a landslide were it not for the Democrat’s chicanery.
We don’t just have different political beliefs. We inhabit different universes as well and I much prefer living in the one that is not predicated on the idea that Donald Trump is a society-saving oasis of truth in a vast desert of lies and deceit.
The stubborn, inexplicable conviction that Donald Trump can be trusted over the media, fact-checkers, and our own eyes. ears and judgment is a uniquely Republican form of insanity.
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