Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election because he was broadly unpopular and running against someone who (at the time) wasn’t. He lost handily, trailing Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes out of nearly 160 million cast.
Only by the electoral college was the race considered particularly close; Biden’s victory came down to 43,000 votes in three states. But that was enough for Trump to launch a fervent, unrelenting effort to try to once again wriggle his way into the White House by claiming that the election had been stolen from him.
In the 1,200-plus days since the election ended, no evidence has emerged of widespread or even significant electoral fraud. Instead, numerous theories elevated or embraced by Trump have been debunked. No election in American history has been scrutinized as robustly and ceaselessly as the 2020 contest. Nothing to suggest that the results were invalid or artificial has emerged.
But that observation comes from the real world, in which arguments are tested and abandoned when disproved. Donald Trump operates in Trumpworld, where reality is dependent on the views and positions of Donald Trump. And in Trumpworld, the idea that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud is accepted as fact, even though it isn’t.
In the Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in September, half of Republicans said that they believed there exists solid evidence of voter fraud, which there doesn’t.
New reporting from The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey suggests that fealty to this Trumpworld idea is becoming a litmus test for people seeking (or hoping to retain) jobs with the Republican Party. The effective ouster of Ronna McDaniel as the party’s chair and Trump’s confirmation as the GOP presidential nominee meant an overhaul of the party itself. Among the changes: quizzing at least some potential employees on their views of the 2020 election.
“In recent days, Trump advisers have quizzed multiple employees who had worked in key 2024 states about their views on the last presidential election, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interviews and discussions. The interviews have been conducted mostly virtually, as the prospective future employees are based in key swing states.”
“’Was the 2020 election stolen?’ one prospective employee recalled being asked in a room with two top Trump advisers.”
A Republican/Trump spokeswoman insisted that the questions were simply aimed at seeking out “experienced staff with meaningful views on how elections are won and lost and real experience-based opinions about what happens in the trenches.” It’s not hard to peel away the veneer here: The party wants their employees to espouse the view and opinion that 2020 was ripped away from Donald Trump.
There’s an obvious immediate utility here. The traditional Republican establishment has struggled for years to accommodate Trump and Trumpism, to exist as respected, credible actors in national politics and political discussions while not alienating the MAGA base. That’s where the election was rigged” narrative came from; it was a way of telling Trump’s base that the 2020 results were dubious without having to muss one’s hair with a check-the-ballots-for-bamboo tinfoil hat.
By checking for fealty to the false “stolen” narrative at the outset, Trump’s allies aren’t simply weeding out people who disagree, they’re weeding out people who won’t acquiesce to the Trumpian approach to reality. They’re not just getting rid of people who won’t go along on this one subject; they’re getting rid of people who won’t go along in general.
Soon after Trump took office in 2017, Xavier Marquez, an expert on authoritarianism, wrote an essay for The Post in which he explained the utility of lies like the one about election fraud to authoritarian leaders.
“[L]ies can help ensure the loyalty of subordinates who are forced to repeat them,” Marquez wrote, more than three years before the 2020 contest. “These kinds of lies need not be credible at all to people outside the regime. The more incredible a lie is, the more it can credibly signal loyalty to a political leader in conditions of low trust. When a subordinate repeats an obviously ridiculous claim he or she is degraded, and bound more closely to the leader.”
Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is the first time since he announced his 2024 candidacy that he assumed control of an existing institution. Upon doing so, he and his allies introduced a screening process that included this fealty test. Which is very much what he’s proposed doing with the federal bureaucracy should he win reelection.
Many of those looking to work for the GOP will have few qualms about acceding to Trump’s version of reality, certainly. Those willing to become party functionaries at this point understand what they’re signing up for. But existing party employees will also probably be disinclined to deviate from any adjustments to their shared worldview. Research published last year found that those who identified their bosses as authoritarian were less likely to correctly spot fake news than people with bosses who encouraged autonomy. More importantly, those with authoritarian bosses were also much less likely to challenge their bosses about false information.
George Orwell’s famous quote from “1984” comes to mind: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
In this case, though, the party isn’t telling anyone to reject the evidence. Not really. There’s a reason that half of Republicans think there’s solid evidence that the election was riddled with fraud: They aren’t being presented with the reality that it wasn’t. Fox News and right-wing social media aren’t assiduously policing misinformation about what happened in 2020 for the simple reason that there’s no utility for them in doing so.
Instead, the party’s just checking to make sure that your eyes and ears didn’t somehow come across the evidence that they’d rather have you ignore.
Tags: revamped Republican Party turns Trumps lies loyalty test
