WashingtonA week ago, Donald Trump got the Wall Street Journal will publish an opinion piece. “Actually, in the elections (of 2020) there was fraud, something that, unfortunately, you do not realize,” said the former president. He completed the article with a score of falsehoods, lies and exaggerations that tried to show that “there was a lot of corruption and irregularities in the vote.” Trump lost reelection exactly one year ago, but he hasn’t changed a comma in his speech. He is still rooted in his obsession full of conspiracies, propaganda and disinformation that intoxicate public opinion and affect American politics, unable to turn the page, immersed in what the former president calls the big lie: a theory without factual basis that his defeat was a hoax, the latest scam in the constant witch hunt of which he always felt a victim.
The big lie It is not simply the tantrum of a character who, since 2016, announced that he would not accept the rules of the game. In a year it has become a creed capable of awakening a revolutionary fury, as demonstrated on January 6 with the insurrectionary assault on the Capitol, in a more adequate response from a sectarian current than from an ideological political reasoning. The events of the Day of Kings could have been the climax and end of the big lie, but it was only the beginning. The big lie It has become almost the only point in the manual of current post-trumpism, the nourishment of a mass of followers who remain incorruptible and faithful to what the former president represents.
The data corroborate it. A Monmouth University poll in June pointed out that 32% of Americans believed that Joe Biden’s victory was only understood because there had been fraud. A more recent poll, from just a few days ago, by PRRI and the Brookings Institute, raises to 68% the Republicans who believe that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump.
The radicalism of the big lie It is fascinating and has a very concrete foundation: the informative refuge that it has found in the conservative channels. 82% of those who report through the conservative channel Fox News believe the conspiracy theory, an almost unanimous following (97%) among those who trust only ultra-right channels.
Democracy at risk
The damage to the democratic sectors of this distrust in the system and in the political reality of the country explains the irreconcilable division existing in the United States. For Timothy Snyder, author of the essay About tyranny (Destiny), “It is always tempting to blame others for a defeat.” “However, for a national leader to do so and inject a big lie into the system puts democracy at risk […]. Democracy would not have to bury itself in a big lie, “he adds.
The feeling is precisely this: that as the rhetoric of Trumpist distrust and disaffection consolidates, the idea of re-unifying the country and recovering a system in which bipartisan agreement is possible is utopian. It is, as Jennifer Mercieca, a communications professor at Texas A&M University defines it, a conscientious “fabrication of disagreement” through easily spread propaganda, conspiracy, misinformation, outrage, and fear, just thinking about own benefit. In the case of Trump, economic (his emails are constant encouraging monetary donations) or, in the future, electoral.
For Snyder, “curing” the United States of this theory of big lie has an easy solution: that all politicians, especially Republicans, accept without further delay and in the most explicit way possible that the 2020 elections were clean, without a trace of fraud or theft or anything like that.
So far the statements have not been made as public as would be necessary, largely for fear of losing a voter pool still closely linked to the beliefs emanating from a former president locked in his resort from Mar-a-Lago. “If we don’t solve the fraud of the 2020 presidential election, the Republicans will not go to vote in 2022 or 2024,” Trump said in mid-October, adding that, “for now, it is the most important thing that they have to do. Republicans “.
The toll of truth
Make it clear that the big lie is a fake would mean losing some loyal Trump supporters who, despite irrefutable evidence, insist on looking for evidence of a fraud that has been shown not to exist as many times as necessary, and who are even capable of using violence to prove it, as seen on January 6.
Even worse: mistrust in institutions and the democratic game have been perversely used by a score of Republican state governments to write and pass laws that, with the fallacious justification of making the voting process safer and having more control over what It happens with the counts and the direct gesture of putting a bulletin in a ballot box, they actually create strategies to limit and restrict the vote, something that mainly affects racial minorities and lower classes.
