6 January 2023 — 1042 mst

Two years after Trump’s attempted coup,
millions embrace his stolen election Big Lie

By James Conner

Two years ago today, thousands of Americans, directly incited by then President Donald Trump, stormed our nation’s capitol, breaking into the building, vandalizing offices, bent on finding and injuring or killing members of Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi in particular, and Vice President Mike Pence, whose decision to abide the U.S. Constitution angered Trump. Hundreds were injured, several were killed.

As we know after two years of investigations, Trump knew he lost, but was determined to overturn the election by replacing duly chosen presidential electors with illegitimate presidential electors. He had accomplices in several states, and in many Republican members of Congress, especially in the U.S. House of Representatives. One such representative was Montana’s Matt Rosendale, who now keeps company with far right wackadoodles like Arizona’s Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar.

According to Monmouth University’s polling institute, approximately three in ten Americans, and six in ten Republicans, still believe — believe against all evidence, against overwhelming, conclusive, rock solid, irrefutable evidence — that Trump lost the election because of fraud, that Biden did not win fair and square.

This refusal to accept facts, to accept reality, has become a group psychosis that poisons and undermines democracy. It’s resulted in departures from reality such as Arizona’s rump recount. In Montana, it has resulted in the creation of a select legislative committee on election integrity whose mere existence falsely legitimizes the premise that something is amiss with the Republican administered elections that Republicans won and that Democrats agree were fair and square.

A good many Republican leaders know that Trump’s big lie is a pile of oats passed freshly through the horse. They’re repeating it because they’re weak, because they lack the sand and savvy to tell their followers that their ex-president is lying to them. They’re afraid that if they tell the truth, they may not be re-elected.

Is that fear justified? In some cases, possibly. But I believe that were the overwhelming majority of elected Republicans, and of party leaders,to stand up in the village square at high noon and shout “You need to know and accept the truth, the truth that Donald Trump lost the election. He lost not because it was stolen; it was not stolen. He lost because Joe Biden won the election fair and square,” a huge majority of Republicans would accept the truth and begin making their way back to reality.

That must happen soon. If it does not, there could be another attempted coup in two years, a coup that could succeed. Were that to happen, the great American experiment of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, would end.