Trump and the Big Lie – Wertheimer op-ed
Enclosed for your information is a piece by Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer titled “Trump and the Big Lie,” published here in Medium and released in Wertheimer’s Political Report on January 7, 2021.
Read the full piece here or below.
Trump and the Big Lie
Fred Wertheimer | 1/7/2021 | Medium
In order to understand the origins of the criminal mob created and incited by Trump that stormed the U.S. Capitol yesterday, we need to go back in history.
In the 1920s, Adolf Hitler coined the term, “The Big Lie.” His propagandist-in-chief, Joseph Goebbels, later explained the concept this way: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
The Big Lie is the language of demagogues, dictators, and authoritarians. It is designed to rally people around a false cause or claim and to support the leader telling the Big Lie.
Trump is a pathological liar. He tested the Big Lie in his pre-candidate days by challenging the birthplace of President Obama. He repeated over and over again his false claim that Obama was not born in this country, knowingly ignoring the truth even after Obama’s birth certificate was made public.
As President, lying was Trump’s most consistent act.
Early in his presidency, Trump falsely claimed that 3 million to 5 million votes had been illegally cast for Hillary Clinton. He never offered any proof for this false claim.
As of November 5, 2020, Trump had made 29,508 false or misleading claims during his presidency, according to The Washington Post.
Trump’s biggest Big Lie began months before the November election, when he started attacking an election that had not yet taken place, claiming it was going to be dominated by fraudulent mailed-in ballots.
He continued attacking the legitimacy of the presidential election up to Election Day. Then, once he clearly and decisively lost, in the months that followed he repeatedly claimed he had won the election and that it was being stolen from him.
Trump did all of this without providing a shred of evidence that the election was stolen from him. More than 60 lawsuits were brought by Trump and his acolytes challenging the election results and all but one was lost. No evidence of the kind of fraud being claimed by Trump was ever presented to the courts.
Nevertheless, a December Quinnipiac poll found that 77 percent of Republicans believe there was widespread voter fraud during the November presidential election and 34 percent believe that Biden’s victory was not legitimate.
This is the direct result of Trump’s Big Lie. So are the criminal, seditious mob actions that occurred at the Capitol yesterday.
Trump created yesterday’s mob when he tweeted on December 20, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
A dangerously unhinged Trump lit the match and incited the mob attack on the Capitol when he addressed them standing on the National Mall yesterday. Trump encouraged the crowd to march on the Capitol, saying, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Trump supporters who believed the election had been stolen stormed and trashed the Capitol.
As Goebbels said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
In the end, however, the victory for our democracy went to our nation’s Founders.
The Founders designed a constitutional system explicitly intended to deal with a potential Mad King George 2.0. The Founders’ system included separation between federal and state powers, and three independent branches of government, an intentional separation of powers.
The independent third branch of government, the judiciary, stopped Trump’s attempted coup stone cold. Republican- and Democrat-appointed and elected judges, including a number of conservative and Trump-appointed judges and Justices, found no facts and no law to support the claims of a fraudulent and stolen election. They ruled, with one insignificant exception, unanimously against the President.
The independent first branch of government, including Congress, state legislatures and their appointed and elected state election officials, also shut down Mad King George 2.0. They were assisted by state executive officials, both governors and state election officials, who defended the conduct and integrity of the election in their states.
The victory of our Founders and the constitutional system they created has brought the country to the point where Joe Biden, in accord with the Constitution, will be sworn in on January 20 at noon as the 46th President of the United States.
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