No really, there wasn’t. There still isn’t.
There was Republican voter fraud, most notoriously by Trump’s White House Chief of Staff. But the 2020 election was legit and Republicans knew it.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump comments on CNN’s blockbuster story about Senator Mike Lee and Rep. Chip Roy’s series of texts with Mark Meadows about Trump’s attempted coup.
What’s particularly striking about the text messages obtained by CNN sent from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) to President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows in the weeks after the 2020 election is how ready they were to think rampant fraud had actually occurred.
For months before Election Day, Trump and his team had been warning that such fraud was imminent, elevating quickly debunked claims about impropriety and pointing at old research on mail-in balloting as evidence that the structure undergirding the vote was shaky. Trump generated an appetite for stories about ballots being found in the garbage or burned up in mail trucks or what-have-you, and the conservative media scrambled to meet the demand. But all of it was objectively unfounded — as one might have expected a senator or a representative to understand.
That Lee didn’t is explained somewhat by the news sources he shares with Meadows as he tries to help shape the White House’s post-election strategy: an article from Breitbart, one from the Washington Examiner, a tweet from a right-wing pundit. Within that bubble, the run-up to the election was a period of rampant scheming and dishonesty aimed at stealing the election.Advertisement
But then the election happened, and it very quickly became obvious that none of this had happened.
Roy and Lee each pushed for Trump and the White House to release proof of rampant fraud, in their own ways.
On the day the election was called for Joe Biden, Roy insisted to Meadows that “we need ammo. We need fraud examples. We need it this weekend.” Two days later, he demanded “a message that isn’t wild-eyed” — seemingly a tacit excoriation of Trump’s eager embrace of whatever nonsense he came across that smelled at all like fraud. And then, a few days after that, Roy inquired about where he might find a catalogue of fraud claims, something that did exist but which was filled with the sort of wild-eyed nonsense he sought to avoid.
Lee’s approach was more technical, centered on creating alternate slates of electors that — importantly — upheld the letter of state law, which Trump’s didn’t. (Lee also touted attorney Sidney Powell, an error in judgment that will haunt his dreams for decades.) But he, too, told Meadows that the White House would need “a strong evidentiary argument” to compel senators.
It’s a reminder that Trump had no such thing. That he has no such thing. That his insistences before the election that fraud would happen were simply replaced with insistences that fraud would be proved, an unending con job that continues to this day.
At the end of November 2020, three weeks after the election had been called, I wrote an article making this point as gently as possible. Trump had made a massive number of claims about fraud in speeches, in interviews and on social media and, to a one, they had been rejected upon examination. Sometimes that led to Trump simply no longer talking about them. Sometimes he ignored the reality, as with the ballots that were removed from a container in Georgia and which Trump insisted were somehow fraud despite the actual, innocent explanation being available for weeks. He raised that one in his infamous call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) — despite Raffensperger’s office having helped debunk the claim!
An uncountable number of times, Trump has claimed that evidence of fraud was coming soon. In the early days after the election, this was probably compelling. If you’re Mike Lee or Chip Roy and you’re hoping Trump won, that the Biden victory could be shown to be hollow, that’s going to be compelling. And, in fact, Roy’s texts to Meadows show that sort of enthusiasm.
On Nov. 22, 2020, he told Meadows that “[i]f we don’t get logic and reason in this before 11/30 — the GOP conference will bolt (all except the most hard core Trump guys).” Hence his excitement on Nov. 24 at this Meadows tweet:
What happened in that case? The court gutted the pro-Trump challenge as baseless. Trump’s allies often claim that no court ever considered the evidence of fraud, a claim that’s often true simply because there was no credible evidence of fraud to consider. But in this case in Nevada, the court was very specific.
“In a detailed, 35-page decision, Judge James T. Russell of the Nevada District Court in Carson City vetted each claim of fraud and wrongdoing made by the Trump campaign in the state and found that none was supported by convincing proof,” The Washington Post reported at the time. “The judge dismissed the challenge with prejudice, ruling that the campaign failed to offer any basis for annulling more than 1.3 million votes cast in the state’s presidential race.”
But, of course, none of this deterred Trump himself. His investment in having people believe that his loss was not a function of his own failings preceded the election by months and has followed the election by even longer. Most Republicans have moved away from claiming that the election was stolen through fraud to instead claiming that it was “rigged” by devious things like nonprofit efforts to increase voter turnout. Trump and die-hards like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, though, keep claiming that there was also rampant fraud and that they are weeks — no, days! no, hours! — away from proving it.
In an interview with The Post’s Josh Dawsey last week, Trump said this specifically. He pledged that in the following days, new evidence of fraud would emerge, showing millions of illegal votes. Then, in the following days, such a claim did emerge. There was no evidence of millions of illegal votes cast — or, for that matter, any illegal votes. Instead what emerged was a blend of technical complexity and crime-show jargon that, at best, might have caught some people collecting and submitting legal ballots in a way that, in some states, violated the law.
It’s easy to look at the past 17 months with hindsight and recognize that Trump’s simply elevating nonsense in his effort to keep his hooks (and his fundraising siphon) embedded in his base. But it was similarly obvious on Nov. 3 that he was not being honest in his assessments of the election. He had spent so long before the election doing what he has spent the months afterward doing: saying things happened that didn’t happen and suggesting that things were nefarious which weren’t.
A member of the House and a senator should have recognized that Trump was being dishonest before the election and should have not assumed that real evidence of rampant fraud would emerge afterward. It hasn’t. By now, it’s safe to say that it won’t.
The problem is that Trump floods the email boxes of his supporters daily with lies about fraudulent ballots being turned up in Arizona and Wisconsin and thousands of hours of footage of Black people stuffing ballot boxes etc. It’s totally convoluted, impossible to decipher and it’s relentless. Trump is telling them that he has proved the case and that is all the proof they need.
This is a problem that might have be solved if the rest of the party and right wing media had come together to tell the truth, which they know, instead of going along with it. But that ship sailed. and now nearly half the country believes the last election was stolen despite the fact that it is a total lie.