A recent CBS/YouGov poll looking at how much Republicans understand the significance of Donald Trump's campaign for the White House contained an interesting, yet disturbing, statistic. As The Washington Post's Aaron Blake pointed out, only 35% of Republicans polled said they knew that Trump had been indicted on charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A nearly equal number, 34%, did not believe he had been indicted on charges of trying to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
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As readers no doubt know, Special Counsel Jack Smith has indeed indicted Trump on multiple charges of conspiring to defraud the government and seize power. The indictment alleges, “The purpose of the conspiracy was to knowingly use false claims of election fraud to interfere with the government's ability to collect, count, and certify the results of the election and to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 Presidential Election.”
Those charges are on hold pending a Supreme Court ruling on Trump's claim of executive immunity, but to most Republicans, those charges don't even exist.
Welcome back to Trump's fact-free alternate reality, where he is using disinformation, ignorance and voter amnesia to try to get back into the Oval Office.
During his campaign, Trump has freely rewritten history, promoted bizarre conspiracy theories and actively pushed the darker parts of his record down memory holes.
So far, it's worked well for him.
A CNN poll found last year that roughly 70% of Republicans believed Biden's 2020 victory was illegitimate, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
A recent Marquette Law School poll found that half of Republicans don't believe Trump had classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, despite photographic evidence. Trump also led an overwhelming majority of his supporters (80%) to believe, without evidence, that the New York hush money charges were brought at the direction of the Biden administration, not just by New York prosecutors. Of course, this assertion has no basis in fact. Even one of Trump's most prominent former lawyers, Joe Tacopina, dismissed the allegation as nonsense.
“Joe Biden and the Department of Justice have no affiliation whatsoever with the Manhattan district attorney's office,” Tacopina told MSNBC. “We know that's not the case, and even Trump's lawyers know that's not the case,” he said. “The people who say that, it's scary because they really don't know the law or what they're talking about.”
But as Tacopina surely knows, this is exactly the message Trump is pushing — and it's working, fueling Republican calls for retaliation and retribution if Trump returns to power.
Trump also relies on Republicans believing his revisionist history about the events of January 6, 2021. At a recent rally in Nevada, he called the rioters who stormed the Capitol “warriors” who were treated “horribly.” Trump has repeatedly suggested he would grant the attackers a full pardon. He has increasingly supported conspiracy theories that government agents may have incited the rioters to enter the Capitol that day.
“They were just protesting a stolen election,” Trump told supporters in Nevada. “And that's exactly what they were doing. And the police said, 'Let them in! Let them in! Let them in!'”
Trump also addressed several other conspiracy theories circulating in the morass of right-wing fanaticism.
“What about Hangman Joe, the guy on the gallows,” Trump once asked, “or the big FBI guy, I don't know where he came from, who says, 'Everybody, get in! Get in! What a trap it was! What a terrible, terrible thing!'”
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These rumors, theories and claims have been repeatedly denied, but it seems to have had no effect on Trump or, apparently, his MAGA supporters. Last December, a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that Republicans were more sympathetic to the rioters than ever before. Only 18% of Republicans said the January 6 protests were “mostly violent,” and 72% of Republicans surveyed said “the attack on the Capitol has been overblown.” Just 24% thought it was “an attack on our democracy that should never be forgotten.”
These numbers are consistent with Trump's success in convincing Republicans of a big lie: Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Republicans do not believe Biden was legitimately elected in 2020. A CNN poll last year found that roughly 70% of Republicans thought Biden's 2020 win was illegitimate, despite a huge amount of evidence to the contrary.
Trump has particularly benefited from this widespread amnesia about his record when it comes to younger voters: A recent poll of 18- to 30-year-olds found that many of them have no idea what Trump has ever said or done in the past.
Fewer than half of voters under 30 have heard of Trump's calls for a Muslim ban, his comment about the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017 that “there were fine people on both sides,” or his assertion that John McCain was “not a war hero” because he was a prisoner of war, according to a poll by Blueprint, a Democratic polling group. Similarly, most younger voters have never heard of Trump's more egregious rhetoric about women and minorities, or his insults toward immigrant communities.
“It may come as a shock to those of us immersed in politics, but young voters have no memory of the day-to-day bickering of the Trump era and have grown up understanding this rhetoric as normal politics,” said Evan Ross Smith, a pollster at Blueprint.
In some ways, voter ignorance is a kind of superpower for Trump. But it is also a potential weakness, especially since Trump's current political power relies so heavily on “disengaged voters.” A recent New York Times analysis found that Trump's small polling lead “is due to rising support among voters who don't pay much attention to politics, don't follow traditional news and don't vote regularly.”
But what happens when disengaged voters start to care, or disengaged voters start to pay attention? What happens when you tell young voters that Trump once said that two non-white congresswomen should “go back” to the “totally broken, crime-ridden places they come from”? Or that in 2017, Trump said that Haitians who immigrated to the U.S. “are all infected with AIDS,” and that Nigerians who see the U.S. “never go back to their shacks”? A Blueprint poll found that a majority of young voters were actually bothered when they learned about these statements.
And what happens as voters learn more about Trump's crimes or remember what kind of person he was? What happens as the holes in their memory fill in?
This is a potential opportunity not just for the Biden campaign but also for the media: If the Biden campaign plays its cards right, Trump may find his campaign reliant on ignorance and amnesia to be far more vulnerable than he currently thinks.
