President Donald Trump is fortunate insofar as his adversaries on the left and in the press have short attention spans. In their thinly veiled, manic pursuit of a silver bullet that proves fatal for the nascent Trump presidency, they have so far allowed the former reality television show host to shape the national conversation at the speed of tweets. Elsewhere in America, though, the president’s words carry more weight than they do on the coasts. Just because Trump and the battalion of critics have moved on from one distracting conspiracy theory to the next doesn’t mean the nation has followed their lead. The longevity of a Trump fabrication is far more durable than the Acela Corridor may imagine.
It is hard to think of a more bizarre display of political instincts than those evidenced in the earliest days of this administration when the president appeared invested in robbing the election he won of legitimacy. Just days after being sworn into office, Trump sparked a controversy by contending that between three and five million votes were cast by ineligible voters—specifically, by illegal immigrants. Trump betrayed his sense of humiliation when he tweeted that he, not Hillary Clinton, had actually won the popular vote—if you subtracted the 2.8 million votes by which she bested him.
Of course, there was no publicly available evidence to back up Trump’s claim. You could count the number of documented cases of voter fraud that took place in 2016 on one hand. That’s typical; contrary to the left’s imprudent habit of indulging in superlatives, voter fraud is not a fiction. Documented occurrences are, however, sporadic. Moreover, they occur on both sides of the political divide, and in numbers too small to shape the outcome of most statewide elections. This was the logic to which Trump’s own lawyers appealed when they petitioned to halt liberal-led recount efforts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
The more the “establishment” in Washington pushed back against Trump, the deeper he dug. In a pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, the president announced his intention to create a federal voter-fraud investigation commission that would be led by Vice President Mike Pence. To the extent that Trump identified an issue this commission could address, however, it was the necessity of states to purge their voter rolls of ineligible or deceased voters. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had already said that the Congress was unlikely to dedicate funds to a special commission when this was an issue best left to state-level authorities.
And that was the end of this controversy for the Beltway. Washington had erred by taking Trump both seriously and literally. Once again, they were burned for their naiveté. Surely, the broader American public in their weather-bitten wisdom knew that it was the spirit and not the letter of Trump’s attacks on voter fraud that mattered. Right? As it happens, this was hardly an errant display of pique that was soon forgotten. It was not a harmless attack on the integrity of the American electoral system that everyone took in stride. Americans were listening to the president, and what he said mattered to them.
Two Quinnipiac University polls in February demonstrated, perhaps unsurprisingly, that politically active Americans are listening to their leaders. The most recent, released last week, showed that six in every ten Republicans told pollsters they believed that voter fraud was the “biggest problem” afflicting American presidential elections. Nearly one-third of all respondents agreed with that proposition. Republicans are now as motivated by what is, at best, a politically opportunistic exaggeration. So, too are Democrats, who remain committed to the evidence-free, Supreme Court-adjudicated notion that voter identification laws are racist and designed to suppress the African-American vote. Trump’s is a blinding partisan trope that only further robs the electoral system of legitimacy and inculcates in Americans a sense of alienation from the institutions that serve them.
In an appearance on CNN this week, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz offered unsolicited his observation that the president’s claims regarding “widespread voter fraud” were entirely bogus. “I don’t see any evidence of that,” Chaffetz said. “We’re not doing an investigation of that.” Chaffetz and the rest of the Beltway have forgotten about Trump’s flight of fancy in the first week of his administration, but the public hasn’t. His partisans hear and believe.
This is worth keeping in mind the next time that Republicans feel compelled to gratify one of Trump’s self-indulgent conspiracy theories. None of this is harmless. The American people are listening, and the instinct to trust the American president isn’t one that should be beaten out of them. If Trump cannot be trusted to be responsible with the authority he wields, it is incumbent on congressional Republicans to be the adults in the room. Hopefully, they take up the charge.
