Why in this flat world do two-thirds of Republicans believe an outright lie?
Maybe because admitting the truth brings too much shame and humiliation
Trump handily won the Iowa caucuses earlier this month. He’s a failed businessman and mediocre ex-game show host who was impeached twice and lost re-election, is ranked by historians as one of the three worst presidents this country has ever had, has been found guilty of or has admitted to all manner of crimes large and small including sexual abuse, defamation, financial fraud, and donation theft, is still facing multiple indictments from over ninety charges, yet the Republican Party couldn’t find anyone better to offer. This wasn’t surprising, since it is indicative of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the modern GOP.
But this essay isn’t about politics and why one of the two major parties in this nation can’t find its way out of their death spiral. It is about factual reality, and the spectacle of millions of people unable or unwilling to accept it.
Because what was surprising about the Iowa caucuses, at least to those like me who want to maintain faith that most people are neither evil nor morons, was how many Iowa Republicans still believe – or at least publicly claim they believe – the ridiculous Big Lie that Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election.
“In the Iowa entrance poll, 66% echoed Trump’s false claim that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the presidency in 2020,” posted journalist Johathan Karl on 15 January via his Twitter (aka X) account. “63% of caucus-goers said they’d consider Trump fit for office even if he were convicted of a crime.”
It should be pointed out that only 15% of Iowa Republicans actually caucused. Nonetheless, about 110,300 participated, so 66% represents nearly 73,000 people. Adults. People who conceivably can read and hold jobs, who can dress themselves in the morning and drive a car without routinely sending it into a ditch. People who “believe” that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump, even without a shred of evidence supporting that.
But this is not just Iowa. About two thirds of Republicans still believe Biden did not legitimately win that election. Which is about 23 million people. By any measure this is insane.
Because let’s be extra clear, the 2020 election was not stolen, it was fair and secure. Biden easily won. Trump lost because he is deeply incompetent and corrupt, and unpopular with a significant majority of Americans. There is no other version of reality.
It was, in other words, another case of our democracy working as it should. Which we, as a country, should be proud of. We should also feel relief since it offers assurance that our election process is strong.
Then why are so many Republicans trying to harm it?
“There remains no evidence that widespread fraud substantially affected the outcome of the 2020 election,” noted Ben Kamisar for NBC News, “and virtually all of the dozens of legal cases filed by former President Trump and allies were dismissed or withdrawn.”
Rudy Giuliani has admitted in court that he lied about incidents of voter fraud. Attorney Sidney Powell, one of the most adamant of those spearheading election fraud claims, pleaded guilty to actually being the one attempting election fraud and trying to overturn a fair and legitimate election. Repeatedly, members of Trump’s White House have testified under oath they knew Biden had fairly won the election, they made it clear to Trump there was no widespread voter fraud, and Trump himself privately acknowledged he lost the election and it was not stolen from him. There have been multiple election audits in various states and all of them have confirmed it was a fair election.
Not to mention, if you know anything about how national elections are held, and the processes in place to ensure voting security at the state level, you know it would be impossible to pull off voter fraud at the scale required to rig a presidential election.
Not to mention, if it could actually be done, don’t you think weasels like Roger Stone and Karl Rove would have been all over that? Why do these conspiracy theorists always claim it is Democrats who are rigging these elections, and why does it always seem to involve Black voters as part of the supposed scheme? (Ooh! I know the answer to that one!)
Not to mention, if Democrats could actually rig elections then why on Earth is Mitch McConnell still in office?
Not to mention, if such fraud did take place it would mean everything on the ballots would be tossed out, which would require all those Republican winners in impacted states to leave their seats.
So why would 23 million Americans believe something that is demonstrably false? Especially since no one is seriously putting it forth as a real scenario, other than the dishonest, self-pitying politician who lost, and even he is on record as not actually believing it.
People who “believe” that Trump actually won in 2020 are essentially in the same boat as those who “believe” the Earth is flat.
And talking with them is like trying to have a conversation at a party with a drunk flat-Earther. They say when they go to the third floor window and look out, the horizon looks flat. You point out that’s only because the curvature is so gentle, when what you really want to say is, you idiot, doesn’t it occur to you that the only reason there even is a horizon is because it is round? They say they don’t understand (and therefore don’t trust) the math used to show the diameter of the Earth. As politely as you can, you explain we’ve known the Earth is round for a few thousand years because even back then there were people with better math skills than you doing the observing and calculating. It’s exhausting, and in the end they walk away still believing it is flat, and criticizing you because you are condescending and an elitist.
It is a given, you see, that they are correct in their “belief” even if thousands of years of knowledge say they are utterly wrong. That reality doesn’t hold its own against what they “feel” to be true and, for some reason, wish to be true. They won’t change their minds in the face of evidence, since it is quite likely they don’t understand the evidence and/or are threatened by its very existence.
Another example of this sort of thinking are the conspiracy theorists who insist that the moon landings are all fake. That madness hit a high mark in September 2002 when a man harassed Buzz Aldrin in Beverly Hills, accusing him to his face of lying about walking on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission. The man called Aldrin a coward and a thief, and 72-year-old Aldrin socked him on the jaw. It was a street version of the beating election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss gave Rudy Giuliani when they sued him for slandering them and lying about election fraud, and winning a $148 million judgement.
So, as with that pathetic flat-Earther at a party, or the weird moon landing conspiracy theorist, we are left with the troubling question of why so many people believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen, when it has been well-established that it was not. Three possible explanations come to mind. In order of likelihood:
They are mentally ill
This is certainly true of some. We can assume most of the people who get swept up into, and publicly support, the absurdities on QAnon are at least temporarily nuts, so that is probably at least partially transferrable here. Mentally ill or delusional, they are dissociating from reality.
They know it isn’t true and they are lying
This is a much bigger slice of the explanation. There are many, many trolls and bullies out there who have no interest in what is true, nor in what’s the right thing to do. They abuse reality for whatever purpose they choose, but typically in the service of something or someone authoritarian. When Elon Musk took over Twitter he intentionally made that platform a haven for those trolls and bullies, sycophantic weasels who attack anyone who isn’t just like them. Perpetuating a lie to undermine the legitimacy of a Democratic president is exactly the kind of thing they would do.
They are, or pretend to be, dumb as posts
Unfortunately, this also seems to be a big slice. If you have read interviews or seen video conversations with the MAGA crowd, with die-hard Trump supporters, you have no doubt been gob-smacked by how clueless many of them are about nearly everything: current events, history, rational thought, how business works, how journalism works, how elections work, how government works, how law enforcement works, how economics works, how the world works. God forbid these people actually read a book, or keep up with world events by consuming diverse news reporting online. They seem to use Trump himself, with his whining and incoherence, as their primary source of information.
But these three still can only be a partial reason. There’s just too many election-deniers out there.
Writing in The Atlantic Daily on 16 January, Tom Nichols put forth yet another explanation, that of the Trump voter as consumed by shame for foolishly hitching their wagon to Trump, in too deep to admit their mistake and suffer the humiliation, and filled with resentment against all those who may not be saying “we told you so” but are almost certainly thinking it.
“These voters now want to get even with their fellow citizens not for what’s been done to Trump but for what they feel has been done to them,” writes Nichols. “They were certain that 2016 would finally bring them the recognition and respect they craved. Instead, Trump set them up for a steady diet of ego-bruising rebukes from other voters. Much like Trump himself, these voters are unable to accept what’s happened over the past several years. Trump, in so many ways, quickly made fools of them; his various inanities, failures, and possible crimes sent them scrambling for ever more bizarre rationalizations, defenses of the indefensible that separated them from family and friends. If in 2016 they suspected, rightly or wrongly, that many Americans looked down on them for any number of reasons, they now know with certainty that millions of people look down on them—not for who they are but for what they’ve supported so vocally.”
God knows there are a lot of strange dimensions to the right wing in today’s America. They are, apparently, perfectly fine with their daughter, wife, sister, or beloved female family friend dying from complications due to an unviable pregnancy (or at least fine with it when it is someone else’s daughter, wife, sister, or family friend). They are happy to arm to the teeth criminals and the emotionally unstable resulting in a firearm death rate otherwise only seen in third world countries and regions immersed in war. They gleefully give the very wealthiest people and businesses subsidies and tax breaks while bemoaning the struggles of the middle class.
There’s a lot of irrational behavior going on, in other words. A big part of that is the willingness to “believe” something that has repeatedly been proved false and which no one in any position of knowledgeable authority is remotely suggesting is the case. It is perverse.
In for a penny, in for a pound, even if it means standing in the middle of the town square insisting that the world is flat, even though everyone, including themselves, knows it is a lie.