big lie

Like most Americans, including White House reporters apparently, I’ve tuned out Donald Trump’s incessant Big Lie that he won the 2020 presidential election — “by a lot.” That means his nonsense about rigged voting and Democrats’ cheating goes mostly unchallenged, and he continues to undermine faith in U.S. elections. After all, it’s not like anyone can shut him up.

Still, it’s time to quit tuning out. Whether a reporter on the beat or a citizen in conversation anywhere, pay attention and push back against Trump’s un-American blather. Because in recent days the power-drunk president has in various ways telegraphed that his Big Lie isn’t just about a past election but a pretext for what he could do to disrupt the next one, the 2026 midterm elections for Congress.

Other 2020 election liars are paying a big price, literally. Just this week, right-wing Newsmax agreed to pay $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems, on top of $40 million in March to Smartmatic, to settle defamation lawsuits based on Newsmax’s false reporting (echoing Trump) that the companies rigged voting machines for Joe Biden. Newsmax’s penalty is of course dwarfed by the $787 million that Fox News paid to Dominion in 2023; in a pending trial, Smartmatic seeks $2.7 billion from Fox.

All the while, the president of the United States continues to spout the same slop, all but immune to legal action, as he sets the stage for 2026.

On Friday, after Trump’s bro-fest summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine, Trump happily recounted to Fox’s Sean Hannity in Alaska that the two presidents digressed to discuss the 2020 U.S. election and — what do you know? — Putin, the KGB-trained master manipulator and well-known arbiter of honest elections (not) supposedly assured Trump that, yes, he actually won big but the election was rigged against him.

As an aside here, recall that Hannity and other Fox network stars privately trashed Trump’s 2020 election lie, according to filings in the Dominion lawsuit, and that Hannity testified under oath: “I did not believe it for one second.” Yet in Anchorage, Hannity nodded along as Trump told him that Putin said Trump won in 2020 “by so much,“ but “your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting. … It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.”

Assuming Putin said what Trump claims, the Russian was playing to Trump’s longstanding, groundless gripes not only against the 2020 election but against voting by mail, which Democratic voters use much more than Republicans do. And Trump, ever the Kremlin’s useful idiot, took his cue: First thing on Monday morning, he declared in a long, error-filled and much-capitalized social media diatribe that he’d “lead a movement” to ban mail ballots and voting machines.

Trump repeated Putin’s falsehood that the United States is “the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.” But in fact, dozens of countries use mail ballots and, as with other forms of voting, research, along with the courts, has found that fraud is vanishingly rare.

The president’s stance on mail ballots is like his position on a ceasefire in Ukraine: He was for it before he was against it (and he was for both things before getting ensnared in Putin’s web on Friday). In 2024, bending to Republican officials’ pleadings that he drop his opposition to mail ballots, Trump urged supporters to vote by mail — as he typically, and hypocritically, does — and even recorded a video promotion.

Now that Trump is back to opposing mail ballots, in Monday morning’s social media rant he yet again contradicted the plain words of the Constitution to claim powers he doesn’t have, that he can order states to get rid of mail ballots and voting machines. “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” he wrote. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”

Here’s the Constitution on that: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

It’s just more proof that both times Trump took the oath of office to uphold the Constitution and “see that the laws are faithfully executed,” he lied then, too.

The president has since repeated that he, with Republican allies, will “do everything possible” to end mail ballots. And he’s saying the quiet part out loud: Without mail-in voting, he told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, “you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting.”

There you have it. Trump’s “movement” against mail ballots, along with his push for red states to redraw congressional district lines to elect more Republicans, is all part of how he’s trying rig elections in 2026, in what is expected to be a bad year for his party given his unpopularity. And it’s all predicated on the Big Lie about nonexistent Democratic election cheating.

There are other warning signs: Trump’s military takeover of the District of Columbia. (Every day brings another announcement of a Republican governor sending National Guard troops.) His occupation of Los Angeles. Repeated threats to send troops to other big, blue cities. All on specious grounds and over the objections of elected local and state leaders.

It’s wholly imaginable, then, that on trumped-up claims (pun absolutely intended) about potential election fraud, Trump would militarize Democratic vote-heavy cities in time for next year’s elections. At a minimum, that would surely intimidate some would-be voters. At worst, well, I don’t even want to speculate about the worst.

When Trump entered presidential politics a decade ago, it took a while for journalists to get comfortable applying the L-word: Liar. But he earned it. Now he’s all but inviting us to expand the nomenclature to include autocrat, dictator or even the F-bomb, fascist.

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WASHINGTON — Just over a quarter of Republicans accept President Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, according to a new survey that underscores the instability of American democracy and the growing partisan divide over the legitimacy of elections.

“There was a hope there would see growing acceptance of Biden’s victory over time, as people moved away from the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement after Jan. 6. Instead, we saw the numbers stay in place,” said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist and one of the founders of Bright Line Watch, an organization that monitors the health of U.S. democracy.

Sinking confidence in election outcomes appears to have been fueled by former President Trump’s “Big Lie” — his continued claims of voter fraud in key states, even though such allegations were repeatedly discredited in numerous lawsuits and audits. The fallout of such lies was especially evident on Jan. 6, when thousands of Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in a brazen attempt to halt lawmakers’ certification of Biden’s victory.

Since then, many Republican officeholders and some of the biggest voices in conservative media have clung to the notion that the election was stolen from Trump.

Bright Line Watch’s November survey, released Thursday morning, shows that only 27% of Republicans accept Biden as the rightful winner — the exact same figure as in the group’s February poll — compared with 94% of Democrats who do.

The survey also shows that the 2020 election and its aftermath have hardened partisan attitudes about future elections, leaving Republicans less confident that their votes will be counted accurately in 2022.

Even amid Trump’s constant rhetoric during the 2020 campaign about a potentially rigged outcome, Democrats and Republicans had roughly equal confidence in October 2020 that the coming election would be decided fairly, with 59% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans believing that would be the case.

But the new survey reveals that a partisan gap has opened up in response to that question. Now, 80% of Democrats believe next year’s midterm election will be fair, with just 42% of Republicans saying the same.

“That’s a really scary fact for our democracy right now, that so many Republican voters don’t have confidence in the election,” said Susan Stokes, another founder of Bright Line Watch and a political scientist at the University of Chicago.

As Trump and so many Republicans have sowed mistrust in last year’s election results, they have used their misinformation campaign to justify new laws in several GOP-controlled states to restrict ballot access and, in some cases, allow partisan lawmakers to overrule election officials in determining outcomes.

That could lead to a scenario in which Democratic voters, even those who understand their party is facing stiff political headwinds next year, lose confidence in the legitimacy of the 2022 electoral results.

“This is an asymmetric moment. Republicans are leading the assault on our democracy,” Nyhan said. “At same time, you can imagine a world where an election is decided because of genuinely dubious election administration practices, and Democrats would become quite distrustful of such an election in the aftermath, and rightfully so.

“You can see a situation where neither side trusts the election results,” he continued. “The potential for a spiral of illegitimacy is real, and that’s not sustainable for our democracy in the long term.”

At the federal level, Democrats have been unable to agree on a legislative response that would protect voting rights, largely because they have the most slender of Senate majorities. Two centrists in the caucus, Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), oppose changing Senate rules to enable Democrats to pass a voting rights law with just 50 votes. And they continue to call for a bipartisan agreement even though few Republicans have been willing to compromise in what has become a zero-sum policy battleground.

The November survey, which questioned 2,750 individuals, also found that partisans tend to overestimate the antidemocratic leanings of the other side, like a reflection of the increasingly partisan nature of cable news and the proliferation of incendiary politically oriented posts and memes across social media platforms.

Compared to past Bright Line Watch surveys, fewer respondents expressed support for political violence. Only 9% condoned making threats, 8% were OK with verbal harassment, and just 4% said they accepted the kind of mob violence that occurred on Jan. 6.

But researchers worry those numbers may not reflect how many partisans might be led to take or support extreme actions that they claim to oppose, with the justification that they need to overcome alleged extremism by the opposing side.

“It’s still millions of Americans condoning violence, and that makes for a very explosive environment and is quite dangerous,” Stokes said. “What people are saying to themselves is: ‘Whatever my side is doing, it’s worth it, because the other side is so terrible.’

“It’s not at all hard to imagine a lot of people in the public going along with a real stealing of the election next time because they have come to believe the other side stole it — or even if they don’t, it’s so important to keep the other side out, it doesn’t matter how you do it.”

There’s a line in Eric Coomer’s defamation lawsuit against Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, that strikes me as the perfect description of what happens when influential partisans belch lies about innocent people in these insanely charged political times:

“The real world consequences for the subjects of those lies,” says the lawsuit, “have been devastating.”

Indeed.

Think of Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, whose lives were destroyed when Rudy Giuliani, once President Trump’s top campaign lawyer, claimed the pair had rigged the 2020 election outcome in their state. Giuliani even invented a blatantly racist story about the women passing drugs to each other at their Fulton County polling place. Trump amplified the claims. The two women received death threats, were loath to leave home even for groceries and had to go into hiding. I will never forget how sad and broken they seemed during their testimony before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Happily, Freeman and Moss won a $148-million settlement from Giuliani, leading the former New York mayor to unsuccessfully sue for bankruptcy in an effort to dodge his obligation. Now stripped of his license to practice law in New York, Giuliani has fallen so far he’s not even a punchline on late night TV anymore.

Just like Freeman and Moss, Coomer, the former director of product strategy and security for Dominion Voting Systems, was subjected to a torrent of false claims about election rigging by Lindell and other right-wing conspiracy theorists and media outlets. Like Freeman and Moss, he was terrorized and driven into hiding.

He left his job, moved to a new location, placed guns around the house he borrowed from a friend, experienced depression and panic attacks, and believes he will not be able to return to his profession.

“People were essentially taking bets on how my brother’s corpse would be found and which nefarious shadow group would be behind his death,” Coomer’s brother told the New York Times in 2021. “He would be executed by the state or he would be found with a falsified suicide note and two gunshots in the back of his head.”

Coomer, like others, became collateral damage in the misbegotten MAGA campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Fox News hosts, including Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs, completely lost their minds, and the company allowed its highest-profile stars to spew lie after lie about the election in general and Dominion Voting Systems in particular, knowing full well (as News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted under oath) that Dominion was blameless and that Joe Biden had won fair and square.

That unsavory chapter ended up costing Fox $787.5 million in a settlement to Dominion, which allowed the right-wing network to avert a trial.

Coomer, who has filed lawsuits against Giuliani and several others who spread lies about him, now gets his day in court against Lindell. The defamation trial, which began Monday, is expected to last through the end of this week. (Coomer settled suits against conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell; Newsmax; One America News Network, or OAN; and an OAN correspondent. His suit against Guiliani is pending.)

The false claims against Coomer were dreamed up by a conservative Colorado podcaster, Joseph Oltmann, who told listeners that he had infiltrated an “Antifa conference call” in which “Eric, the Dominion guy” claimed to have rigged the election against Trump. (Coomer’s defamation suit against Oltmann is also pending.)

“Oltmann,” says Coomer’s lawsuit, “claimed this supposed call happened on some unspecified date months before the election, but that he did not think to take action until after the election was called for President Biden …. Oltmann’s story is inherently implausible.”

Not to mention, outlandish and preposterous.

In his campaign against Coomer, Oltmann posted a photo of the Dominion executive’s home on his social media and urged his followers to “blow this sh— up. Share, put his name everywhere. No rest for this sh—bag … Eric we are watching you.”

Lindell, who seems never to have come across a right-wing conspiracy theory he couldn’t embrace, picked up on Oltmann’s fantasies about Coomer and began spreading them far and wide — in interviews, on his website, in social media, etc.

On his FrankSpeech media platform, Lindell addressed Coomer directly: “You are disgusting and you are treasonous. You are a traitor to the United States of America.” (Classic case of projection, imho.)

Lindell could have settled as so many others have done. Instead, he has chosen to fight on, hawking pillows, sheets and slippers to pay his legal bills as he goes. His attorney said that because he believed what he was saying was true, it’s not defamation. “It’s just words. All Mike Lindell did was talk,” Lindell’s attorney told the jury. “Mike believed that he was telling the truth.”

Before the trial, Lindell stood on the federal courthouse steps in Denver and proclaimed that his only goal in all this was to ban electronic voting machines and replace them with paper ballots.

“If we can get there,” he said, “I would sacrifice everything.”

If Coomer wins his defamation case against Lindell — and I really hope he does — Lindell will have lost a lot and gained very little. First, the case has nothing to do with the validity of voting machines. Second, an estimated 98% of American voters already cast ballots that leave a paper trail because that’s one way voting machines record votes.

But Lindell, like so many of his MAGA compatriots, still won’t let reality stand in the way of Trump’s Big Lie.

@rabcarian.bsky.social Threads: @rabcarian