Michigan Republicans Shoot Down Trump’s Idiotic Election Fraud Claims
As Donald Trump did everything he could to hang onto power last year, he leveled transparent lies of fraud at the swing states he dropped to Joe Biden—including Michigan, which he accused of taking “a landslide victory and [reducing] it to a tight loss.” He barely took the trouble to sketch out the contours of the self-serving conspiracy theory he was peddling, but his allies ran with it anyway, adopting it as the organizing principle of their party and using it to help erode their base’s faith in the democratic process.
While much of the GOP at the national and state level have cosigned Trump’s bad faith attacks, a panel of Michigan Republicans on Wednesday released a report laying waste to the lies, making clear what those living in reality already knew: There was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Voting machines weren’t hacked. Pillow man Mike Lindell doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. A picture supposedly showing an illegal ballot dump in Detroit was actually just a photographer carrying his equipment. The former president and his allies, the committee wrote in summation, “pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.” But none of that is stopping Trump supporters from making fevered demands that the state carry out an “audit” like the one Arizona launched in the spring—or, for that matter, keeping the GOP-controlled panel that debunked Trump’s fraud claims from supporting the kinds of voting restrictions that have grown out of those claims.
“This Committee found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election,” read the report, which was composed by three Republicans and one Democrat in the state legislature. “However, we cannot and should not overlook severe weaknesses in our elections system,” the panel added, endorsing laws to tighten restrictions on absentee ballots and other measures that supporters of the Big Lie have proposed or enacted in states like Florida and Georgia.
Trump notched a key victory in Michigan in 2016, helping him upset Hillary Clinton to ascend to power. But Biden flipped the state last year, besting the incumbent by nearly three points. Neither Trump nor his supporters were able to accept that, though, and the state has been one of the front lines in his unending war against the election results. That’s meant threats to elected officials there—in addition to a foiled pre-election plot by Trump supporters to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer over the COVID-19 precautions she implemented—and calls for partisan reviews, à la the grotesque exercise underway in Arizona that Trump himself has suggested is the first step toward nullifying Biden’s win and returning to office.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes,” Trump said in a profoundly weird rant to Mar-a-Lago members in April. “So we’re going to watch that very close to the end. After that we’ll watch Pennsylvania and you watch Georgia and you’re going to watch Michigan and Wisconsin and you’re watching New Hampshire—they found a lot of votes up there just now, you saw that?”
Trump’s delusions may be laughable, but they are shared by a great many in his party: A new study found that a large majority of Republicans believe Trump actually won the election and that Biden is not a legitimate president. Most disturbingly, perhaps, nearly half believe states should override the popular vote to give Trump the victory either way.
The Michigan report makes clear that not all Republicans support such an over-the-top disregard for democratic norms. But even those in the GOP who will call out the most obvious lies and conspiracies are willing to embrace the Big Lie through subtler means: They may not call for votes to be overturned, but they’ll point to “doubt and questionability” in the process to exert more control over how Americans exercise their rights going forward. Such a campaign, in progress in states across the country, stands a much better chance of putting Republicans in power in 2022 and 2024 than some MAGA fever dream of overturning a months-old election and re-installing Trump as soon as this summer. But the report will surely not be taken that way by the nutjobs escalating things in Lansing, where pro-Trump protesters demanding an audit have gathered to demand Democratic leaders in the state be put in “shackles.” “It seems we have become ground zero in this effort we see across the country to suppress democracy,” Democratic State Representative Donna Lasinski told the Washington Post, “and deny the peaceful transfer of power.”
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