Credit: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/The New York Times
When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version.
Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible.
People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to resist the […]
If Trump and his enablers are not given consequences, this has been normalized, and the decline will be unceasing. And if organizations and individuals are allowed to disseminate lies (like Trump’s ‘stolen election” or Fox News alligations that what happened in the Capital were “antifa” terrorists)…….then we are stuck with continual chaos.