Many Republicans just refuse to believe their own eyes. And those that do believe their own eyes apparently don’t give a damn that Trump tried to overturn an election and incited an insurrection.
Philip Bump at the WaPo takes a look at why that might be:
Why don’t Republicans think the statement about Georgia — referring to a conversation in which Trump said that he wanted officials to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” — is believable? Perhaps in part because right-wing media hasn’t spent a lot of time talking about Trump’s actions. That includes limited coverage of the House select committee, and it includes less coverage of things like the Georgia call.
Trump’s request to the officials has often been summarized as his asking them to “find 11,000 votes.” Since January 2021, when The Post first reported on the call, there have been 475 15-second segments on the three most popular cable news channels in which those words appear. Only 44 of them were on Fox News.
When Fox News has covered the Georgia call, as it did more frequently in August 2023 at the time that Trump was indicted in the state, it has often done so in a way that’s overtly sympathetic to Trump’s position.
Judge Jeanine Pirro said, “If you say, ‘Look, I need to find 11,000 votes. That’s very different from saying, ‘I need you to find 11,000 votes somewhere.’”
???? Talk about dancing on the head of a pin.
CNN polls show that “7 in 10 [Republicans] have consistently said they thought the election wasn’t legitimate. The only change has been that, in January 2021, more than half said there was solid evidence to that effect. Now, far more are likely to say that this is only their suspicion.”
Bump continues:
Trump’s supporters and members of his party have excused his actions from the outset. In January 2021, Monmouth University asked Americans whether they approved of the House impeaching Trump for his post-2020 efforts. Most Americans said they did — but only 3 in 10 Republicans agreed. In polling conducted by Pew Research Center earlier this year — after more than four years of additional evidence coming to light, about half of Republicans said Trump did nothing wrong in his efforts to subvert the last election.
It’s those kinds of findings that make me despair about this country. Nothing he does will separate these people from Dear Leader:
This pattern is very much in keeping with polling over Trump’s presidency. Views of Trump’s actions didn’t change over the course of the Russia investigation or over the course of his first impeachment, with Republicans generally unmoved by the aggregation of evidence against him. The 2020 response was no different. The argument from Trump critics that his actions subverted democracy simply haven’t gotten traction from members of his party willing to excuse them.
He can literally do no wrong with these people.
How do you deprogram 40 million people from a cult?