By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday,
October 09, 2024
Greetings
from Cedar City, Utah. I’m here for the OneUtah conference, which is really
just a wonderful gathering of state and local officials, business and
educational leaders, and the like. But all I really have to report is that Utah
remains one of the most impressive—and impressively decent—places in America.
Also, the Fair Jessica and I went on a really cool helicopter ride this
morning.
One
downside of being here is that I don’t have a lot of time to write the G-File,
so I’m going to skip some steps. Ramesh
Ponnuru and Nick
Cattogio have both written excellent columns on the sinister and corrupting
role that the “stolen election” canard—and it is a canard—plays in Republican
politics today.
The
steps I’m skipping can be summarized by a simple word that captures my opinion
of both pieces: Ditto.
Ramesh
notes that elected Republicans constantly say they want to move on to other
issues whenever asked whether they believe the 2020 election was stolen. But
they find it difficult to do so because they refuse to answer the question
honestly. “What’s absurd is not the question but the fact that it has to be
asked,” Ramesh writes. Referring to Mike Johnson, he adds that all the speaker
of the House “had to do to be able to move on to the topics he prefers was tell
the truth, which can be done succinctly: Biden won. (He could have added an
‘unfortunately.’)”
Meanwhile,
Nick writes the following about denying the results of the 2020 election:
It’s become the political equivalent of the
riddle of the Sphinx: As in ancient times, woe to those who answer incorrectly.
For Republicans caught between Trump on the
one hand and national swing voters on the other, the only safe-ish response is
to dodge. That’s what Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton did on Meet
the Press this past Sunday when the riddle was put to him. “Joe Biden
was elected president in 2020,” he allowed—before quickly adding that “it was
an unfair election in many ways” due to states changing their voting laws
during the pandemic, Twitter suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story for a
few days, and so on.
So does that mean Trump lost?, he was asked
repeatedly. And repeatedly, he wouldn’t say. “Joe Biden was elected president”
was as far as he would go.
Again,
ditto.
My
own favorite recent example of Republicans dodging the question was in the vice
presidential debate. Tim Walz asked J.D. Vance, point blank, about Trump:
“Did he lose the 2020 election?”
“Tim,
I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied huffily, and then he immediately
asked, “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake
of the 2020 COVID situation?”
This is focusing on the
future? The bad thing that happened explicitly and uniquely because of Trump in
the wake of the 2020 election is ancient history, according to Vance, but this
semi-bogus thing Kamala Harris allegedly or theoretically did in “the wake of
the 2020 COVID situation” is the future? How does that work?
Anyway,
other than the dittos, there are some points I’d like to add.
The
conventional wisdom on the Trumpy right is that Americans don’t care about the
stolen election stuff in no small part because the anti-Trump left hasn’t shut
up about it. Obviously, there’s some truth here. The conventional wisdom on the
left is that the right doesn’t care about the stolen election stuff because
they don’t care about democracy. I think there’s some truth to that among Trump
and his inner circle, but I don’t think that’s as true about rank-and-file MAGA
types or Republicans. They believe that Democrats cheated … somehow. They’re
just not sticklers on the details. As Rudy Giuliani put
it in 2021, “We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the
evidence.”
A
lot of these voters don’t want to hear about how Trump is a threat to
democracy, because they vaguely think Trump has a Christmas pony of a point
somewhere amid all the manure he flings. But more to the point—or at least my
point—I think many of them simply accept that Trump’s charges of election fraud
are “fake but accurate,” to borrow
a phrase, and the way the left explains its case just seems too hysterical,
abstract, or self-serving to make a dent with them.
The
result is that people who believe Trump tried to steal the election—which he
did—end up just asserting it, rather than arguing it. The people who believe
the Democrats successfully stole the election do likewise. And everyone in
their respective echo chambers nods along. These Sunday show appearances that
Ramesh and Nick write about are so maddening precisely because Republicans are
trying to maintain credibility with their echo chambers and with Trump, while
also seeming reasonable.
Anyway,
I think it would be better if these interviewers stopped asking the guests to
agree with the conclusion, but instead engaged with the actual facts more. This
pro-forma approach—“will you say now that the election wasn’t stolen?” “Do you
believe Joe Biden is the president?”—just let’s everyone play their own game.
Also, it really needs to be emphasized that if Republicans actually believe
what they’re saying they should be desperate to engage on the facts. If
you actually think the election was stolen by the Democrats and that the media
helped cover it up, you should welcome such questions, not whine about
them.
My
personal peeve is actually the best argument presented by Trump and his
defenders. They argue that Democrats in places like Pennsylvania “exploited”
COVID to make absentee voting easier and then—mumble-mumble—this made it easy
for them to steal the election. The reason why this is their best argument is
not just because the others are so stupid, but that the rules were violated in
Pennsylvania. A court, not the legislature, changed them. And that’s not how
it’s supposed to work.
But
that doesn’t prove the mumble-mumble part. First of all, there’s no evidence
that these changes led to any significant fraud. Second, those changes aren’t
synonymous with fraud. And, third, if it was so obvious these changes would be
good for Democrats, why didn’t Pennsylvania Republicans complain about them at
the time?
Moreover,
even if you can demonstrate that these changes in Pennsylvania amounted to
fraud—they don’t—how does that explain, say, Arizona, or Georgia? So many
people seem to think there’s a transitive property to Pennsylvania’s
(fictional) fraud. It’s as if somehow proving or merely asserting misdeeds in
Pennsylvania somehow helps to make the case for misdeeds in Georgia and
Arizona, two Republican-run states in 2020. Whatever Democrat conspiracy
you think occurred in Pennsylvania, even if proven, doesn’t get you far in
establishing that Republican Govs. Brian Kemp and Doug Doocey were in on
it.
Still,
none of this addresses the more basic problem that has been almost completely
ignored by both sides.
You
know what other states changed their rules because of COVID? Well, it wasn’t
just Pennsylvania. It wasn’t even the three or five swing states Trump lost.
Republican-controlled states like Alaska, Arkansas, Missouri, Montana,
Louisiana, Nebraska, and West Virginia, changed their absentee voting rules
because of COVID. So did a lot of Democrat-run states. In fact, most
states
changed their rules to deal with the pandemic. You know why? Because there
was a frick’n pandemic.
I
understand that some people are so mad about how COVID was handled they think
anything done by anybody to combat it—save for Donald Trump—was illegitimate
and nefarious. But, as legitimate as some complaints about the CDC or Fauci
etc. might be, they don’t make election conspiracy theories more plausible. You
know what does? Facts.
Trump
and his enablers made it sound like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were
outliers in how they changed the rules because they were run by Democrats. This
made it possible to say, “See what the Democrats did to steal the election!”
That
sounds plausible, so long as nobody responds, “Yeah, they did the same thing
Republicans did in numerous states!” It’s true that Florida didn’t ease
absentee voting rules for the pandemic. But that’s because the state had
already made voting by mail super easy before the pandemic.
In
other words, what made most of those swing states special wasn’t how they
changed the rules, but that they were decisive in Trump’s defeat. Trump didn’t
care that Florida had massive numbers of absentee ballots—because he won
Florida. But Pennsylvania? Can you believe how they used absentee ballots?!
It’s an outrage!
In
some ways this gives Trump World more credit than it deserves, because again,
the “they changed the rules for COVID” argument is the very best argument
the “Stop the Steal” people have offered. It’s still not good. But it’s much
better than the other stuff about Italian satellites, blah-blah Facebook, Hugo
Chavez, Arizona’s Sharpie
pen scandal, North Korean fraudulent ballots, and Dinesh D’Souza’s
embarrassingly stupid 2000 Mules BS.
Anyway,
I guess I’m just old-fashioned. When people lie, they should be confronted with
facts and be asked to explain them. Asking people to testify about what they
believe—at least for this kind of thing—is a waste of time. Asking people to
explain why they believe it, and to provide facts to back it up, is a better
use of everyone’s time.
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