What Are The Elements Of Trumps Big Lie
1. The election was stolen because its not possible Trump didnt win.
In Trumps telling, the big lie is that the election was stolen from him. A lie as massive as the stealing of an election with hundreds of millions of voters requires a bunch of smaller lies Trumps used to sow doubt about the election.
CNNs Facts First team has been writing about Trumps specific election lies for many months, first leading up to the election, which he falsely claimed was rigged, and after he lost, when he falsely claimed it had been stolen in a variety of ways, all of which have been disproved. Look at this fact check from Daniel Dale, which addresses these crazy quotes, none of which are accurate:
- millions of ballots that have been altered by Democrats, only for Democrats.
- All of the mechanical glitches that took place on Election Night were really THEM getting caught trying to steal votes.
- 700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which means, based on our great Constitution, we win the State of Pennsylvania!
In every key state he lost, Trump has pushed an explanation, sowing doubt without actually proving anything.
In Georgia, he claimed, there were suitcases of ballots, the state didnt verify signatures, there was general mass cheating, military ballots went missing.
Thats just Georgia.
I Dont Think There Is Any Way To Get Through To Them
These days, identifying as Red or Blue, or as a die-hard Trumper or anti-Trumper, has become a kind of mega identity, as its been dubbed by Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University associate professor of political science. She says partisan identity has become so fully fused with cultural, religious, racial, gender, and geographical identity that its very high stakes for people to break with their party or the party line.
To feel that they are losing all wrapped together, thats a devastating psychological harm, says Mason. And people tend to react to that with a lot of not only anger, but really defensive mechanisms.
Thats why Mason says no recount or court case is going to be convincing to Trump supporters who are clinging to the myth that their side didnt actually lose.
At this point, over one year out, I dont think there is any way to get through to them, Mason says. Theyve had this entire fever dream, where Trump is really stoking these ideas of No matter what anybody else tells you, Im telling you youre a winner. And that feels great. Thats just like the most primitive human instincts to follow the good feelings, not the bad feelings.
Masons research shows the level of loathing. She says a clear majority of Republicans now see Democrats as not only a serious threat to the nation, but also downright evil. Democrats also feel that way about Republicans to a slightly lesser degree, Mason says, but theyre catching up.
Who Is Most Likely To Believe The Big Lie
Figure 3 explores who is most likely to reject the election result. It presents the results of a simple linear probability model, regressing the binary legitimate variable on demographic covariates of interest. The left panel presents results for Republican voters, and the right panel presents results for voters who identified no partisan affiliation.
Figure 3 Perceptions of 2020 Election Outcome by Partisanship and Demographics
Notes: The figure shows the coefficient estimates from a linear probability model where the binary legitimate variable was regressed on demographic covariates of interest. Starting on November 8, the legitimacy question was preceded by the sentence, Major news networks have announced that Joe Biden is the winner of the 2020 presidential election, and the estimates in this figure reflect data collected after that date. Line segments represent 95% confidence intervals. All data drawn from Electoral Legitimacy Tracking Survey .
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Low Public Trust Could Hurt Vaccine Distribution In Minority Communities
After two centuries, it is impressive that Americans still are inclined to believe what a president tells them, especially at a moment of crisis, Beschloss said. When a president breaks that bond of trust with the American people, it makes it harder for future presidents to have the kind of moral authority that enables them to protect us.
NBC News has fact-checked Trump for more than four years. Based on thousands of hours of reporting and hundreds of reported fact checks, four issues stand above the rest as the falsehoods that define the Trump presidency.
Where Did The Term The Big Lie Come From
It comes from Adolf Hitler, actually. In Mein Kampf, he accused Jews of spreading lies about how the German army performed in World War I.
The historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobson wrote about it in The Washington Post a few years ago:
Adolf Hitler first defined the Big Lie as a deviant tool wielded by Viennese Jews to discredit the Germans deportment in World War I. Yet, in tragically ironic fashion, it was Hitler and his Nazi regime that actually employed the mendacious strategy. In an effort to rewrite history and blame European Jews for Germanys defeat in World War I, Hitler and his propaganda minister accused them of profiting from the war, consorting with foreign powers and war shirking . Jews, Hitler contended, were the weak underbelly of the Weimer state that exposed the loyal and true German population to catastrophic collapse. To sell this narrative, Joseph Goebbels insisted all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands.
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Trump Misuses Taxpayer Money For His Personal Gain
Trump channels taxpayer funds to his companies and his own benefit.
President Trump, in a stark break from his predecessors, has maintained ownership of his worldwide business enterprises and profits from them. This has resulted in massive conflicts of interest and in Trump being able to channel taxpayer money to his own benefit.
Trumps habit of paying himself with other peoples money is not new. During his presidential campaign, Trumps campaign paid Trumps companies $12.8 million. 84 That means nearly 10 percent of Trumps campaign expenses went to benefit Trump. 85
This practice continued in 2017. President Trump spent almost one-third of his first year in office at various Trump properties including around 40 days each at his golf course in Bedminster, NJ and his Florida resort at Mar-a-Lago, which he has referred to as a Winter White House. 86 When he does this, the federal government pays Trumps businesses for various costs.
Presidents have historically divested their business interests to prevent exactly this kind of problem, no matter how unlikely it was to occur. Thus, President Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm and warehouse into a blind trust in order to prevent potential conflicts of interest.
Maintaining ownership of his business enterprises and ignoring the conflicts of interest inherent in this decision have resulted in President Trump misusing his public office for personal gain at the expense of taxpayers and campaign contributors.
Trump Attacks On The Rule Of Law
A government of laws and not of men. John Adams, 1780
President Trump treats as nonexistent the rule of law, a foundational tenet of our constitutional system of government. His repeated attempts to influence the administration of justice to serve his personal or partisan goals reflect his apparent view that we are a government of men and not of laws, in direct opposition to core principles that have always governed us.
Trumps repeated assaults on the Justice Department and the FBI are designed to pressure those agencies to make investigative and prosecutorial decisions based on his political desires, often against his political adversaries. President Trump saw the role of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director James Comey as protecting him. He told Sessions it was his fault they were in the current situation after the Special Counsel probe was launched. 103 He fired Comey after failing to get a requested commitment of loyalty from him, with the clear implication it was Comeys job to serve Trumps interests, not the obligations of his office. 104
According to the The New York Times, Mr. Trump has made clear that he sees the attorney general and the F.B.I. director as his personal agents rather than independent figures, lashing out at both for not protecting him from the Russia investigation. 105
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Claim Of Intervening In 2018 Florida Vote Count
On November 10, 2022, Trump alleged that Democrats had perpetrated “ballot theft” four years earlier in the Florida gubernatorial election. He claimed that, as President, he had intervened to support Republican candidate Ron DeSantis over his Democratic rival Andrew Gillum. “I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys,” Trump claimed, when it seemed that DeSantis had been “running out of the votes necessary to win.â Trump said he had thereby âfixedâ the DeSantis campaign. Gillum filed in court to demand further information from Trump, as it sounded like an admission of wrongdoing meanwhile, Florida’s Broward County elections office denied that any such thing had happened during the 2018 election.
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Asked whether Trump will ever be able to admit the loss, and thus the lie, Lee, who is also currently president of the World Mental Health Coalition, said, “Probably not.”
She said people like Trump have an “apparent fragile sense of self” which makes it difficult to receive criticism or disapproval. “This makes him more likely to fall into a psychotic spiral in the situation of a major rejection, such as election defeat, rather than admit loss,” Lee said. “And this is, indeed, what has happened,” Lee said.
Robert Erikson, a political science professor at Columbia University, agreed that Trump “makes up the truth that he wants to be true.”
“He can never be wrong, and that’s why losing is such a blow to him. He convinces himself and everyone else that he really won the election in a landslide. He can’t fill in the blanks about how this fraud occurred — because it’s just total lunacy — but that’s what he wants people to believe,” Erikson said.
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Trumps Obstruction Of Justice
Obstruction doesnt have to be a crime in order to be wrongful.
President Trump obstructed the investigation into Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election, regardless of whether or not he violated criminal laws. How do we know this? The President told us so.
On January 6, 2017, the nations four top intelligence and investigative agencies issued a joint report concluding with high confidence that Russian operatives had tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election on the orders of President Putin. 11 The Washington Post had reported a month earlier that it was the assessment of the intelligence community that Russias goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected, according to a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation for U.S. Senators. Thats the consensus view. 12
On May 9, 2017, President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was heading the Justice Departments Russia investigation. This occurred after Trump had asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to Trump, and after Trump had asked Comey to drop the FBI investigation into Michael Flynn, the presidents first national security advisor. Comey refused both requests. 13
Trumps Failure To Release Tax Returns
An affront to the standard of transparency observed by every modern president.
Every president since Harry Truman has released his federal income tax returns to the public, with the exception of Gerald Ford, who produced detailed summaries of his income taxes. 143 The practice is beneficial for both the president and the public at large: public tax returns can shield the president from charges of self-dealing and provide the voters with useful information about their leaders. This custom was broken by Donald Trump. His failure to follow his predecessors example is based on broken promises and lies.
Before running for president, Trump offered assurances that he would follow the footsteps of all candidates and presidents. If I decide to run for office, Ill produce my tax returns, absolutely, he said in a 2014 interview. I would love to do that. 144 His attitude had evidently changed by the time he became a candidate. After a full campaign and a year in officea year in which Congress passed a tax cut for high income earners and corporations President Trump has yet to release anything. Some information about his taxes has emerged nevertheless. His 1995 return was shared with the New York Times, revealing the declaration of a $916 million loss, a deduction so large that it could have wiped out his entire federal income tax liability for as long as 18 years. 145 And in March 2017, a copy of his 2005 return was obtained by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. 146
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In The Art Of The Deal
Tony Schwartz is a journalist who ghostwroteTrump: The Art of the Deal. In July 2016, Schwartz was interviewed by for two articles in The New Yorker. In them, he described Trump, who was running for president at the time, highly unfavorably, and described how he came to regret writing The Art of the Deal. When Schwartz wrote The Art of the Deal, he created the phrase “truthful hyperbole” as an “artful euphemism” to describe Trump’s “loose relationship with the truth”. This passage from the book provides the context, written in Trump’s voice: “I play to people’s fantasies … People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggerationâand it’s a very effective form of promotion”. He said Trump “loved the phrase”.
Schwartz said “deceit” is never “innocent”. He added, “‘Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?'” Schwartz repeated his criticism on Good Morning America and Real Time with Bill Maher, saying he “put lipstick on a pig”.
Trumps Failure To Drain The Swamp
Trump has filled the Swamp, not drained it as he promised during his campaign.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised to drain the swamp in Washington. Since then, he has done just the opposite. Trump has failed to do anything to move forward on the drain the swamp reforms he promised to pursue during his presidential campaign. In fact, Trump has made far worse the swamp problems caused by influence-buying and special interest and lobbyist dominance in Washington at the expense of ordinary Americans. President Trump has opened the door wide to Washington lobbyists to serve in his administration. 45 Trump has also loaded his administration with corporate and financial industry executives whose past companies benefit from administration policies.
According to the Washington Post, six months into the Trump administration there were already 74 lobbyists working in the administration, including 49 who were working for agencies they used to lobby. Twenty former lobbyists were working in the Executive Office of the President. 46
Trump began his presidency by naming retired Gen. Michael Flynn as his first national security advisor. Flynn had been lobbying for a Turkish businessman with ties to the Turkish government before he was named national security advisor, and after he was appointed he played a role in formulating administration policy on Turkey.
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Why Millions Think It Is Trump Who Cannot Tell A Lie
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Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
Why is Donald Trumps big lie so hard to discredit?
This has been a live question for more than a year, but inside it lies another: Do Republican officials and voters actually believe Trumps claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election by corrupting ballots the same ballots that put so many Republicans in office and if they do believe it, what are their motives?
A December 2021 University of Massachusetts-Amherst survey found striking links between attitudes on race and immigration and disbelief in the integrity of the 2020 election.
According to the poll, two-thirds of Republicans, 66 percent, agreed that the growth of the number of immigrants to the U.S. means that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity, and the same percentage of Republicans are convinced that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate with voters from poorer countries around the world.
Following 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 Posts Monkey Cage:
McCurry went on:
The former president, she continued,
Al-Gharbi sharply disputes this conclusion:
Trump : Even More Off The Chain
Why does President Donald Trump lie so much? Because people believe him.
So says Billy Bush, who is on his own rehabilitation mission after losing his sweet NBC Today show co-host job after his Access Hollywood tape fiasco with Trump in late 2016.
Appearing on HBOs Real Time With Bill Maher on Friday, Bush recalled how Trump exaggerated ratings of his Celebrity Apprentice shows when they faltered later in the shows run.
Hed been saying its No. 1 forever and finally, Id had enough, Bush recalled to Maher. I told him, Wait a minute, you havent been No. 1 for like five years not in any category, not in any demo. He goes, Did you see last Thursday? Last Thursday, 18-49, the last five minutes.
But later, when the cameras were turned off, Bush said, Trump was more candid. Billy, look, Trump said, you just tell them and they believe it. Thats it: You just tell them and they believe. They just do.
Right. They just do.
Or as P.T. Barnum is said to have said, Theres a sucker born every minute.
This is the sort of cynical attitude that is seldom expressed openly by politicians.
Bushs story sounds not only credible but highly likely, if youve been following our presidents breathtakingly cavalier attitude toward inconvenient facts.
Among other tallies that have kept fact-checkers busy, The Washington Post reports that his average of 4.9 false or misleading statements per day has soared up to an average of six a day.
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