Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Recounts and firings further Trump’s crusade, which the public starts buying

Election 2020

President Trump on Tuesday night tweet-fired Christopher Krebs as head of the agency overseeing election security, which has labeled this contest "the most secure in American history,"

Tom Williams/Getty Images

President Trump can fire people for false reasons and for free, as he's most recently proved with the dismissal of top federal election security official Christopher Krebs, but now he's decided to put serious money where his election disinformation mouth has been.

On Wednesday the campaign committed $3 million from it's not-so-flush coffers to pay for recounts in the two biggest counties in Wisconsin, saying without evidence they saw the "worst irregularities" in a state where virtually complete returns have President-elect Joe Biden ahead by 21,000 votes. And midnight is the deadline for finishing a hand tally of nearly 5 million votes in Georgia, where the president has picked up about 1,000 votes and may be able to demand a state-funded recount because he's less than half a point behind.

Trump's persistence in challenging his defeat, in its 11th day since the returns became decisive, has not come remotely close to changing the result — because there are no facts backing up his allegations of significant voting fraud in every swing state he lost. But new polling shows Trump is having significant success in his unprecedented-for-a-president campaign to foment distrust in the essential activity of American democracy.


Only 73 percent agree that Biden fairly won the election, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll taken in the previous five days and released Wednesday, with 52 percent of Republicans convinced Trump "rightfully won" a second term. Asked why, 68 percent of GOP voters said they were concerned the election was "rigged." One in six Democrats and one-third of independents were similarly worried.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The poll also showed a worrisome increase in voter suspicions from four years ago. Only 55 percent of adults agree the Nov. 3 election was "legitimate and accurate," down 7 points from a similar poll after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton (and still asserted he'd been robbed of millions of votes). And the 28 percent who said they thought the results were "the result of illegal voting or election rigging" was up 12 points from 2016.

The results strongly suggest the drumbeat of assertions by Trump -- and the decisions of top Republicans across the country to not contest, let alone contradict, him -- have done as much to shape perceptions about the sanctity of electoral democracy as the non-partisan experts or even the people in his own administration charged with safeguarding the vote.

Trump on Tuesday night used Twitter to fire Krebs, who as director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had overseen the 2018 and 2020 elections. He had spent the past weeks refuting the president's election conspiracy theories, most prominently convening a panel of federal and state election officials who last week concluded this election "was the most secure in American history."

"There were massive improprieties and fraud — including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, 'glitches' in the voting machines which changed ... votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more," Trump tweeted. "Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated."

Twitter flagged the tweet for promoting misinformation.

The dismissal came as the president saw one of his rare post-election successes turn to rejection. The elections board in Detroit, after initially refusing to certify the results from Michigan's biggest county, changed its mind and locked down Biden's total of 68 percent of the vote just in time, assuring he would carry the state's 16 electoral votes by about 3 points.

Biden's current lead is 364,000 votes in the pair of Wisconsin counties where Trump has decided to pay for a recount, which are centered on heavily Democratic Milwaukee and Madison. "We will not know the true results of the election until only the legal ballots cast are counted," the president;s attorneys said. In 2016, a statewide recount added a mere 131 votes to Trump's winning total.

Even if both the Wisconsin and Georgia results were to be miraculously reversed, that would still mean Trump had gained only 26 electoral votes — a dozen short of what he needs to win

On Tuesday, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani ran into significant skepticism at a federal courthouse in Pennsylvania, when he argued that results showing Biden secured its 20 electoral votes by more than 82,00 votes should essentially be tossed out altogether. ""At bottom, you're asking this court to invalidate more than 6.8 million votes, thereby disenfranchising every single voter in the commonwealth. Can you tell me how this result can possibly be justified?" Judge Matthew Brann asked.

The Trump campaign on Tuesday also filed a similarly aggressive lawsuit In Nevada, which Biden has carried by 2 points, asking a federal judge to either declare Trump the winner or to reject the state's election results.

On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, the nearly total GOP appeasement of Trump's behavior showed signs of cracking, if only passively. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy conceded the election results are "driving" toward a Biden win, and several GOP senators offered congratulations to their colleague Kamala Harris when she appeared in the chamber for the first time since being elected vice president.

Read More

Podcast: How do police feel about gun control?

Podcast: How do police feel about gun control?

Jesus "Eddie" Campa, former Chief Deputy of the El Paso County Sheriff's Department and former Chief of Police for Marshall Texas, discusses the recent school shooting in Uvalde and how loose restrictions on gun ownership complicate the lives of law enforcement on this episode of YDHTY.

Listen now

Podcast: Why conspiracy theories thrive in both democracies and autocracies

Podcast: Why conspiracy theories thrive in both democracies and autocracies

There's something natural and organic about perceiving that the people in power are out to advance their own interests. It's in part because it’s often true. Governments actually do keep secrets from the public. Politicians engage in scandals. There often is corruption at high levels. So, we don't want citizens in a democracy to be too trusting of their politicians. It's healthy to be skeptical of the state and its real abuses and tendencies towards secrecy. The danger is when this distrust gets redirected, not toward the state, but targets innocent people who are not actually responsible for people's problems.

Keep ReadingShow less
Your Take:  The Price of Freedom

Your Take: The Price of Freedom

Our question about the price of freedom received a light response. We asked:

What price have you, your friends or your family paid for the freedom we enjoy? And what price would you willingly pay?

It was a question born out of the horror of images from Ukraine. We hope that the news about the Jan. 6 commission and Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination was so riveting that this question was overlooked. We considered another possibility that the images were so traumatic, that our readers didn’t want to consider the question for themselves. We saw the price Ukrainians paid.

One response came from a veteran who noted that being willing to pay the ultimate price for one’s country and surviving was a gift that was repaid over and over throughout his life. “I know exactly what it is like to accept that you are a dead man,” he said. What most closely mirrored my own experience was a respondent who noted her lack of payment in blood, sweat or tears, yet chose to volunteer in helping others exercise their freedom.

Personally, my price includes service to our nation, too. The price I paid was the loss of my former life, which included a husband, a home and a seemingly secure job to enter the political fray with a message of partisan healing and hope for the future. This work isn’t risking my life, but it’s the price I’ve paid.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Given the earnest question we asked, and the meager responses, I am also left wondering if we think at all about the price of freedom? Or have we all become so entitled to our freedom that we fail to defend freedom for others? Or was the question poorly timed?

I read another respondent’s words as an indicator of his pacifism. And another veteran who simply stated his years of service. And that was it. Four responses to a question that lives in my heart every day. We look forward to hearing Your Take on other topics. Feel free to share questions to which you’d like to respond.

Keep ReadingShow less
No, autocracies don't make economies great

libre de droit/Getty Images

No, autocracies don't make economies great

Tom G. Palmer has been involved in the advance of democratic free-market policies and reforms around the globe for more than three decades. He is executive vice president for international programs at Atlas Network and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

One argument frequently advanced for abandoning the messy business of democratic deliberation is that all those checks and balances, hearings and debates, judicial review and individual rights get in the way of development. What’s needed is action, not more empty debate or selfish individualism!

In the words of European autocrat Viktor Orbán, “No policy-specific debates are needed now, the alternatives in front of us are obvious…[W]e need to understand that for rebuilding the economy it is not theories that are needed but rather thirty robust lads who start working to implement what we all know needs to be done.” See! Just thirty robust lads and one far-sighted overseer and you’re on the way to a great economy!

Keep ReadingShow less
Podcast: A right-wing perspective on Jan. 6th and the 2020 election

Podcast: A right-wing perspective on Jan. 6th and the 2020 election

Peter Wood is an anthropologist and president of the National Association of Scholars. He believes—like many Americans on the right—that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and the January 6th riots were incited by the left in collusion with the FBI. He’s also the author of a new book called Wrath: America Enraged, which wrestles with our politics of anger and counsels conservatives on how to respond to perceived aggression.

Where does America go from here? In this episode, Peter joins Ciaran O’Connor for a frank conversation about the role of anger in our politics as well as the nature of truth, trust, and conspiracy theories.

Keep ReadingShow less