2020 RIGGED ELECTION NONSENSE: A PREVIEW OF THINGS TO COME.

There is a reason for Trump’s insistence, in the absence of any real evidence, that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and stolen from him. He intends to make the same claim of a stolen election next November if the vote doesn’t go his way. And next time, he will have scores of Republican members of Congress and senators hyperventilating with him about election fraud.

The stage is being set, and the cast of deniers will be well rehearsed. The last time Trump attempted to undo the presidential election was clumsy and almost laughable. None of Trump’s lawyers would allege in court what they were claiming outside of court. That’s because you can’t go into court and make such claims without evidence, and there was no objective evidence to present.

Donald Trump will never concede that he could lose an election to Joe Biden. So, next November, expect to see a well-planned war plan to challenge the election should he lose. In 2020, Trump had no strategy for contesting the election. He and his lawyers just fulminated outside of court and sheepishly presented no evidence of fraud in court. They wouldn’t even claim before a judge that the election had been rigged because they knew they would be sanctioned if they made such a claim in the absence of any evidence to back up their bogus claims of serious fraud.

It is now clear. Any Republican acknowledging Biden’s 2020 election victory will be banished from Trump World and the new Republican Party, the Party of Trump. The transformation of the Grand Ole Party is now complete, and the transformation is a body blow to our two-party system of democracy. Republican denialism regarding the 2020 election isn’t merely a historical footnote. It is a preview of the coming attractions.

We are no longer a nation in which the voters decide which political Party can best deliver what the people, by and large, agree is in their best economic and social interest. Well-functioning, two-party political systems have, in the past, more or less, generally served the interests of the societies to which they answer. That’s because cohesive societies typically consist of people with reasonably similar goals. The competition for ideas in a large, diverse, and relatively homogeneous society generally coalesces close to the political center. Nations in which the people, by and large, strive for civil security, constructive discourse, and economic opportunity can thrive when two political parties compete to deliver those objectives to the people they serve.

When political competition, however, is focused on alternative visions of political structure and securing power at the destruction of political competition, the result will almost always be destructive outcomes. Today, the United States is in danger of becoming a nation of competing realities rather than a nation of competing ideas to enhance the common good. It is a zero-sum competition in which one system of governance prevails and rules over the demise of any competing system of governance.

Spirited competition to determine which political Party can, at any given time, best serve the interests of the people is a good thing. Competition to determine how one political Party can best destroy the other is destructive to the political process and, ultimately, to the people political parties are formed to serve. Today’s Republican Party does not merely seek to out-compete its rival Democratic Party but rather to destroy it. They do this by repeating ad nauseum that there was massive fraud in the 2020 election but provide no evidence of such fraud. As we learned in another place and another time, nearly a century ago, a big lie repeated over and over again will be believed by enough naïve people who want to embrace the worst of political slander.

Free speech is the great strength of American democracy. When first enshrined and guaranteed in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the concept electrified and revolutionized the world. And that is a good thing. While we celebrate the relatively unfettered right to express ourselves as we wish and express our opinions without fear of retribution, responsible men and women have an implied obligation, although not necessarily a requirement, to utilize that right responsibly and without malice. We Americans have wide latitude in engaging in hyperbole, lies, truths, half-truths, and untruths without much fear of retribution. Nowhere is this more obvious than in political discourse.

As the old saying goes, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” And so, the Trumpian calumny that Biden and the Democrats rigged and stole the 2020 election has become the holy grail for any Republican who wants to advance in today’s Trumpian GOP. Embracing this lie is now the price of entry for any Republican who wants to compete and advance in the Party of Donald Trump. And yes, it has become his Party and will remain his Party as long as Republicans tolerate his one rule for membership, i.e., the unfounded claim that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.

Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project determined that as of March 2021, six states participated in election audits or recounts. According to the report, states such as Georgia and Michigan conducted state-wide recounts, while Wisconsin performed recounts in Dane and Milwaukee Counties. All three audits upheld Biden’s victory in those areas.

While Trump filed “six challenges to the counting process” in Pennsylvania, the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project found that the courts dismissed all those challenges. Subsequently, a series of election audits were performed in Maricopa County, Arizona. A final report in March 2022 found no meaningful evidence of fraud in the county.

Recounts and audits have repeatedly demonstrated no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election sufficient to have altered the election outcome –not even close. Nonetheless, Trump and his political acolytes have kept the “rigged election” drum beat beating for the past four years.

There is a lesson to be learned from all of this. Ethan Zuckerman, a civic media scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, explains the implosion of trust in the United States. “Americans don’t trust big business. And we don’t trust schools. We don’t trust unions. We don’t trust newspapers. You name it, we don’t trust it,” he says.

Zuckerman, who, according to Foreign Policy Journal, is one of the top global thinkers, believes that lack of trust can be directly tied to an erosion of faith in US leadership.

“In the 1960s, if you asked Americans whether they had faith in the government to do the right thing all or most of the time, 77 percent of them said: ‘Yes, I’ve got faith in the government,’” according to Zuckerman.

“By the time we hit the 1980s and Reagan, we’re down to about 25 percent of Americans who say they trust the government. By the time we get to Obama and Trump, we’re under 15 percent.”

“So, if you don’t trust the media, and you don’t trust the government, and you don’t trust your employer, and perhaps you don’t trust your neighbors, who can you trust?” Zuckerman asks.

According to Zuckerman, the answer is, “You trust people on the internet who share the same points of view that you do.”

Small wonder Donald Trump keeps the stolen-election drumbeat going. It’s working.

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Katherine Gehl, co-author of The Politics Industry and founder of the Institute for Political Innovation,

Jazz artist Ann Hampton Callaway,

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Senator Barbara Boxer,

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Novels by Hal Gershowitz