Political partisans often feel like elections were stolen from them. Shock and disbelief are, after all, the first stage of grief. But never before has a president of the United States led the charge in creating that false impression. Nor has any prior president refused to abide by the peaceful transfer of power inaugurated first by President George Washington’s decision not to run for a third term and President John Adams’ peaceful transfer to Thomas Jefferson after the two ran against each other in 1800.
Trump has turned this 200-year-plus tradition, the bedrock of American democracy, on its head through a disinformation campaign designed to maintain his power within the Republican Party and its aligned media system.
Like everything else Trump has done as president, his entire scheme to steal the election is not meant to succeed in
reality — reality, in this case, being judged by actual courts and judges. It is, rather, intended to
succeed on television or social media by making his supporters believe that Trump lost due to fraud and not think of him as a loser.
So far, it is working. The
majority of Republicans state a belief that the election was
rigged against Trump. (It wasn’t.) And
nearly every Republican Party politician has either backed Trump’s false allegations of mass voter fraud or refused to accept that Biden won and is now president-elect.
