Republican politicians need to be clear with their constituents: there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election — and Donald Trump lost.
Trump’s loss shouldn’t be hard for Republican leaders to substantiate. Election experts and secretaries of state from both parties have repeatedly debunked the baseless conspiracy theories peddled by the president that the election was stolen from him.
Yet many elected Republicans have continued to play along with Trump’s lies. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, reportedly asked Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger, a Republican, about invalidating legally cast ballots. (Graham later denied that he had asked that.) And Mike Pompeo, the U.S. Secretary of State, said at a press conference this month that there would be “a smooth transition to a second Trump term.”
This rhetoric is dangerous and it has real-world implications.
As the president has continued to push his false narrative, the typically apolitical process of auditing and certifying election results has become a partisan spectacle. On November 17 in Wayne County, Michigan, home to over 800,000 voters, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, the two Republican members of the four-person Board of Canvassers, refused to certify the votes. Wayne County, a consistently Democratic area, is where Detroit is located, a city where Black residents make up 78% of the population. Palmer and Hartmann supported the certification of votes in other parts of the county that are predominantly white, even though several of those areas had higher rates of ballot irregularities than Detroit.
On a Zoom call that later went viral on Twitter, Ned Staebler, one of the Democratic board members, spoke directly to the two Republicans. “The stain of racism that you, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer, have just covered yourselves in, is going to follow you throughout history,” he said. Staebler continued, calling Hartmann and Palmer “two people completely racist and without an understanding of what integrity means and a shred of human decency.” Both Hartmann and Palmer reversed their decisions and certified the votes later that evening.
A handful of elected Republicans have acknowledged President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, though most have offered only watered-down statements about the importance of a peaceful transfer of power. Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, said earlier this month that he would “step in” if the Trump Administration continued to block Biden from receiving intelligence briefings, only to later walk back his statement and say he was “not in a hurry” to allow Biden access to the briefings. On Monday, after Michigan certified its election results, more Republican senators acknowledged Biden’s win, and the administrator of the General Services Administration, a Trump appointee, initiated the formal transition to the Biden Administration.
Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, appeared to acknowledge last week that a change of administrations was coming, telling reporters that “We’re going to have an orderly transfer from this administration to the next one.” This should not be cause for praise or celebration, though. McConnell, one of the most powerful figures in Washington, has continued to refuse to denounce Trump’s false claims of fraud and say that Biden won the election.
Of course, the president has every right to pursue legal action, whether his claims have merit or not. But the reality is that the fraud Trump is claiming to reveal is simply not there. Realizing this, three of his lawyers have recently withdrawn from cases they were arguing on his behalf and the Trump team’s new lead lawyer, Marc Scaringi, has said that the litigation “will not reverse this election.”
Since his 2016 run for office, Trump has consistently told his followers what they want to hear, giving them people to blame for their suffering and violent hatred to latch onto. We should not be surprised that Trump’s supporters are following his every word now, even as his claims of fraud are being debunked from left and right.
The president is simply continuing this pattern of spreading lies to his constituents, giving them validity to what they want to believe, as the reality of a two-term Trump presidency becomes a true impossibility.
Trump and his fellow Republican politicians are pushing conspiracies, false realities and plain lies onto the American people, taking advantage of their supporters’ blind loyalty. If you voted for Trump, it’s much easier to believe that he won, that the other side cheated, than to admit defeat. These people have not only been told that this election was fraudulent, but also that a Joe Biden presidency will ruin their lives.
When President-Elect Joe Biden, who received nearly 80 million votes, inevitably takes office in January, the 74 million people who voted for Trump will have a new president, whether they like it or not. But what will it do to our democracy when so many of those voters don’t trust that Biden won fairly and believe that their voices weren’t heard?
This blind following and unquestioning belief in politicians and other leaders is not the only danger to democracy; there is the danger to truth itself and to those who strive to find and present real facts and an honest reality.
Out of the Trump Administration’s reckless and chaotic leadership came the terms “alternate facts” and “fake news,” denoting, in many cases, any sort of media coverage disparaging the president and his administration. However, the advent of this term has dangerous repercussions for journalists during and post-Trump administration.
As student journalists on the Paper Tiger staff, we have watched Trump excoriate that truth that we have pledged to tell.
The “news” has, historically, meant facts. Reputable newscasters and journalists of reputable news media deliver unbiased and true information about events in the world. Even where op-eds, commentaries or personal narratives are concerned, everything a good journalist does is built off of the truth. But when the president of an entire country, over the course of nearly five years, delivers hundreds, if not thousands, of misleading or false statements — lies — on highly visible platforms like Twitter, even facts can be misconstrued to look like opinions.
The President’s forceful and, debatably, charismatic nature has led millions of Americans to believe what is simply not true.
To misconstrue facts and opinions is a dangerous mistake to make in a year when, according to Johns Hopkins University, over 255,000 Americans have died of a virus that the president himself refused to acknowledge the severity of. And in a time when the only source for information for many Americans is indeed the news media, this disbelief of honest and accurate news-telling is deadly.
As many of us learn in high school, not all news sources are created equal and some must be treated with more scrutiny than others. The unprecedented disregard for this fundamental approach to taking in information might be called a second pandemic, one that has been ravaging the country since 2016.
Contemporary journalists from responsible publications must now wrestle with the idea that even factual evidence might not be enough to convince millions of Americans that Trump has lost the election, all because the President, in a 6 a.m. tweet, called one of their stories “fake news.”
A fact is supposedly indisputable; that is the nature of a fact. But in a time when facts are smeared as disputable, in a time when facts are, apparently, just as debatable as human rights, in a time when rumors war with reality, how do we resuscitate trust in real facts?
