Rage over 2020 vote is likely to outlast Trump
Few support rioters, but belief in false narrative of election fraud is widespread
WASHINGTON — For many Trump supporters, the inauguration of Joe Biden this week will be a signal that it is time to move on. The president had four years, but Biden won, and that is that.
But for a certain slice of the 74 million Americans who voted for President Donald Trump, the events of the past two weeks — the five deaths, including of a Capitol Police officer, the arrests that have followed, and the removal of Trump and right-wing extremists from tech platforms — have not had a chastening effect.
On the contrary, interviews in recent days show that their anger and paranoia have only deepened, suggesting that even after Trump leaves the White House, an embrace of conspiracy theories and rage about the 2020 election will live on, not just among extremist groups but among many Americans.
“I can’t just sit back and say, ‘OK, I’ll just go back to watching football,’ ” said Daniel Scheerer, 43, a fuel truck driver in Grand Junction, Colo., who went to the rally in Washington this month, but said he did not go inside the Capitol and
had nothing to do with those who did. He said he did not condone those who were violent, but believed that the news media had “totally skewed” the event, obscuring what he saw as the real story of the day — the people’s protest against election fraud.
“If we tolerate a fraudulent election, I believe we cease to have a republic,” he said. “We turn into a totalitarian state.”
Asked what would happen after Biden took office, Scheerer said: “That’s where every person has to soul search.”
He continued: “This just isn’t like a candidate that I didn’t want, but he won fair and square. There’s something different happening here. I believe it needs to be resisted and fought against.”
Scheerer said that he was not advocating violence and that he was not part of any group that was. But he echoed the views of many who supported the recent events in Washington: a fervent belief that something bad was about to happen, and an instinct to fight against it.
Polls indicate only a small fraction of Americans approved of the riot in Washington. A Washington Post-ABC News poll found 8 percent of adults and 15 percent of Republicans support “the actions of people who stormed the U.S. Capitol last week to protest Biden’s election as president.” That is far from most voters, but enough to show that the belief in a stolen election has entered the American bloodstream and will not be easy to stop.
“It’s a dangerous situation,” said Lucan Way, a political scientist at the University of Toronto who writes about authoritarian regimes. “The ‘election was stolen’ narrative has become part of the political landscape.”
The country’s political divide is no longer a disagreement over issues like guns and abortion but a fundamental difference in how people see reality. That, in turn, is driving more extremist beliefs. This shift has been years in the making, but it went into overdrive after the Nov. 3 election as Trump and many in his party encouraged Americans, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to believe the results were fraudulent.
The belief is still common among Republicans: A Quinnipiac poll published Jan. 11 found 73 percent still falsely believe there was widespread voter fraud.
Now, with Biden’s inauguration Wednesday and so many Americans enraged about the election, state capitals and Washington are on high alert, with soldiers and security perimeters, bracing for further acts of violence.
“Polarization is not the problem anymore,” said Lilliana Mason, a political psychologist at the University of Maryland. “Now it’s the threat to democracy.”
When Mason began surveying people in 2017 about their tolerance for political violence for a book on partisanship, she did not expect to find much. Partisanship was always seen as an inert, harmless thing, she said, a way to get people interested in the otherwise boring topic of politics.
She was wrong. She and her co-author, Nathan Kalmoe, found that the share of Americans who say it is “at least a little bit justified” to engage in violence for political reasons has doubled in three years, rising to 20 percent after the election, from 10 percent in 2017. The trend was the same for both Republicans and Democrats. But the election was a catalyzing event: The Republicans who said they condoned violence became more approving after it, Mason said. Democrats stayed about the same.
Mason said she worried that more violence and attacks on elected leaders and state capitols could be coming, saying the country could be in for a period like the Troubles, the conflict in Northern Ireland in which sectarian violence kept the region unstable for 30 years.