“notwithstanding a long series of disappointments for litigants trying to demonstrate that the presidential election was illegitimate, culminating in two unanimousrejections by the Supreme Court last week. According to a recent Fox News poll, 68 percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Trump voters believe “the presidential election was stolen.”
Some of those Trump fans may simply be signaling their loyalties or giving the response they think will irk the president’s enemies. But unless Trump supporters are perpetrating an elaborate gag nearly as sophisticated and complex as the baroque conspiracy he blames for denying him a second term, there are a lot of true believers out there.
Believing Trump requires accepting his claim that election officials across the country—possibly aided by a long list of co-conspirators that includes George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, and several foreign governments—used fraud-facilitating voting machines to give Joe Biden an edge, then switched to manufacturing “hundreds of thousands” of phony paper ballots when the original plan fell short. It also requires believing that pro-Trump news outlets, Republican election officials, Republican members of Congress, Trump-nominated judges and justices, the Department of Homeland Security, and Trump’s own attorney general helped conceal that conspiracy by casting doubt on the president’s charges or obstructing his efforts to overturn the election.
The alternative to buying all that is to conclude that Trump has refused to admit defeat, whether for personal or political reasons, and has therefore resorted to increasingly desperate explanations for Biden’s victory. That hypothesis is consistent with everything we know about Trump, including his disdain for the truth, his enormous yet fragile ego, and his allergy to accepting responsibility.
It is also consistent with the chasm between Trump’s assertions and the claims his campaign has made in court. In a 46-minute Facebook rant earlier this month, Trump complained that “even judges so far have refused to accept” that he won the election—hardly a niggling detail, since courts are the forum where Trump had to support his charges with credible evidence.
Trump thinks the Supreme Court “chickened out” when it declined to hear Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit seeking to overturn the election results in four battleground states. The justices simply “didn’t want to rule on the merits of the case,” the president avers.
Yet state and federal judges have ruled on the merits of Trump’s legal arguments and rejected them, often in blistering terms. Equally telling, the Trump campaign’s lawsuits have failed even to allege the sort of vast criminal conspiracy he describes in speeches and tweets—possibly “because there are legal consequences for lying to judges,””