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Conspiracy requires followers to join Trump in alternate universe

No matter how many times Bullwinkle J. Moose fails to pull a rabbit out of his hat, he remains optimistic. “This time for sure!” he exclaims, disregarding his sidekick’s exasperated complaint that the trick “never works.”

If Donald Trump has any skeptical friends like Rocky the Flying Squirrel, he does not listen to them. Otherwise, he would not be demanding all true patriots join him in an alternate universe where he won reelection. Many of Trump’s supporters seem to live there, notwithstanding a long series of disappointments for litigants trying to demonstrate the presidential election was illegitimate, culminating in two unanimous rejections by the Supreme Court. According to a recent Fox News poll, 68 percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Trump voters believe “the presidential election was stolen.”

Some Trump fans may be signaling their loyalties or giving the response they think will irk the president’s enemies. But unless Trump supporters are perpetrating an elaborate gag nearly as complex as the baroque conspiracy he blames for denying him a second term, there are a lot of true believers out there.

Believing Trump requires accepting his claim that election officials across the country used fraud-facilitating voting machines to give Joe Biden an edge, and then switched to manufacturing “hundreds of thousands” of phony paper ballots. It also requires believing pro-Trump news outlets, Republican election officials, Republican members of Congress, Trump-nominated judges and justices, the Department of Homeland Security and Trump’s own attorney general helped conceal that conspiracy.

The alternative to buying all that is to conclude that Trump has refused to admit defeat and has resorted to desperate explanations for Biden’s victory. That hypothesis is consistent with everything we know about Trump, including his disdain for the truth, his enormous yet fragile ego and his allergy to accepting responsibility.

It is also consistent with the chasm between Trump’s assertions and the claims his campaign has made in court. Trump thinks the Supreme Court “chickened out” when it declined to hear Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit seeking to overturn the election results.

Yet, state and federal judges have ruled on the merits of Trump’s legal arguments and rejected them. Equally telling, the Trump campaign’s lawsuits have failed even to allege the sort of vast criminal conspiracy he describes in speeches and tweets. In his motion to join Paxton’s lawsuit, Trump admitted that he couldn’t back up his claims of systematic cheating. “It is not necessary for the Plaintiff in Intervention to prove that fraud occurred,” said Trump’s lawyer, John Eastman. The problem, he argued, was that the election procedures challenged by Paxton made any such scheme “undetectable.”

That argument contradicted Rudy Giuliani’s claim the purported conspiracy is “easily provable” and the president’s assertion “the evidence is overwhelming.” By Eastman’s account, the plot to steal the election cannot be documented, meaning its existence must be accepted as a matter of faith. In other words, there is no rabbit. But like Bullwinkle, Trump may still unleash fearsome beasts, one of which already has devoured our shared sense of reality.

Jacob Sullum is a nationally syndicated author.

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