What happened to Republican fulminations about “rigged elections” and “election fraud”?
Ever since Donald Trump was re-elected last month, it’s been crickets. Republicans apparently believe the 2024 election was free and fair, and Democrats aren’t disputing the results with their own version of “stop the steal.”
It is tempting to see this as a reassuring vindication for democracy, but that would be a mistake. Right-wing election deniers, including local heroes like Nevada GOP chair Michael J. McDonald and conspiracy theorist Robert Beadles, haven’t expressed any remorse or shame for their palpable falsehoods or the havoc they caused.
What we’re actually seeing is a glib confirmation that, for many Republican leaders, the truth doesn’t matter. Toxic disinformation and blatant lies are just tools. The ends justify the means.
That has corrosive implications, not just for the democratic process, but also for good governance and the rule of law. People who are willing to spew lies in order to win elections will also be ready to break ethical rules and laws once they are in power. And citizens who believe the government is run by corrupt hacks will increasingly break the law themselves if they can get away with it.
We have seen this in Nevada. In December 2020, I regularly observed “Stop the Steal” rallies in Carson City. Speaker after speaker denounced the election results and flirted with the idea of violent resistance. Armed members of Oath Keepers and the Three Percenter militia groups strolled on the sidelines in full camo. Local Proud Boys came with pistols on their hips. A month before the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, at least one speaker called Vice President Mike Pence a “traitor.”
Top leaders of the Nevada Republican Party currently face criminal charges for carrying out their own fake-elector scheme in league with Trump and his underlings. Led by McDonald, the group submitted a list of false electors and a false certification that Trump had won in Nevada.
And who can forget the havoc caused by Robert Beadles, the local businessman and conspiracy theorist who spent huge amounts of money promoting election denialism? Among many other things, Beadles accused the Washoe County registrar, Deanna Spikula, of “treason” and of counting fraudulent votes. Spikula came under so many threats that she resigned. After Beadles sued Washoe County, the Nevada Supreme Court ordered Beadles to reimburse the county $106,000 in legal costs. In December, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider his appeal.
The ethos of trying to overturn legitimate elections will translate directly into how the new administration conducts itself.
Trump has explicitly said he wants to use powerful government agencies to go after his enemies. Here’s only a partial list of the people Trump has recently said should go to jail: President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former president Barack Obama and Liz Cheney, the former Republican member of Congress who accused Trump of illegally instigating the insurrection on Jan. 6.
I doubt the courts will go along with those kinds of prosecutions. But there are many other ways that Trump would like to use government agencies to exact revenge. He tried to get the U.S. Postal Service to raise shipping rates on Amazon, presumably to get back at its owner, Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. He can use regulatory agencies to punish companies he doesn’t like. He could conceivably use the Internal Revenue Service as well, as Richard Nixon did. He has already threatened to pull broadcast licenses from CBS.
More fundamentally, it seems clear that Trump wants to undermine the credibility of the government overall. His nominees for top cabinet posts are often people who have been enemies of the departments they would run: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer, is his nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services; and Kash Patel is to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Others are demonstrably inexperienced.
But making the government perform badly is actually a benefit for those who want to undermine government on principle, as many GOP leaders do. As the writer Masha Gessen has written, incompetence is a feature and not a bug.
Whether or not you agree with Trump’s policy agenda, you should worry about democratic institutions and the health of government itself. You may not know what you’ve lost until it’s gone.
Edmund L. Andrews is a former reporter with The New York Times and a member of Indivisible Northern Nevada. He lives in Zephyr Cove.