Voters failed to vanquish the ‘Big Lie’

Voters in the six major battlegrounds rejected election-denying candidates. That’s good news for our democracy. But more than 170 election deniers did win lesser seats in state and local elections.

This needs to be said again and again until Republican election deniers come to their senses: Those insisting the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump are a threat to our democracy. Their intemperance is a recipe for lawlessness, not the “law and order” they claim to stand for (“Maryland Republican chair Dirk Haire won’t seek reelection, says party self-destructed in election with ‘counterproductive and petty nonsense,’ ” Nov. 14).

First of all, for four straight years, poll aggregators showed that roughly 10% more Americans disapproved of Trump’s job performance than approved. So why would Trump and his cult followers expect him to win by a “landslide?” It makes no sense. Not to mention Joe Biden was and is a far less divisive politician, a far more experienced statesman and a far more decent human being. Americans grew tired of Trump’s lies, name-calling and otherwise boorish behavior and wanted someone more presidential.

Second, these remain indisputable facts: Sixty state and federal courts saw no evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. The U.S. Supreme Court, stacked 6-to-3 with Republican appointees including three Trump nominees, saw no reason to review the lower court decisions. Bill Barr, Trump’s own attorney general, saw no evidence that the election was stolen and said under oath that Trump’s claims were “bogus and silly and usually based on complete misinformation.”

Only dictators ignore election outcomes and court decisions. Only they and their goons resort to violence the way Trump’s lynch mob did on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump didn’t go into the U.S. Capitol building, but he condoned the violence by watching it on TV for three hours and doing nothing to stop it. Courts were established by civilized societies so that disagreements could be resolved peacefully in a room rather than violently in the streets or on a battlefield. Even when they make unpopular decisions, those decisions need to be respected or peacefully challenged by legal means. There is no third alternative. Not in a democracy.

So why do members of the Trump cult keep repeating the “Big Lie?” Because a skilled, egotistical demagogue reminiscent of another German demagogue from the last century keeps repeating it.

Marie Brenner, an investigative journalist who helped expose the tobacco company lies and the Enron scandal, wrote an accurate characterization of Trump more than 30 years ago in a Vanity Fair article entitled “After the Gold Rush” that you can still find on the internet. In it was this comment from one of Trump’s own lawyers 32 years ago: “Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory. If you say something again and again, people will believe you.”