Friday's postcard, and something a tad worse than stupid

July 28, 2023

The big wall at the Escure Ranch property in remote Whitman County

Mindsweeping Truth

“The reason there’s a former president being indicted is because the Republican Party nominated and elected a criminal.” - Stuart Stevens, Republican campaign strategist.

It perhaps goes without writing that my politics lean to the left. As far as I can tell, it’s a bend that took root during the Watergate scandal. It wasn’t just the crime and the coverup. It was also the infuriating behavior of Nixon’s defenders led by Rep. Charles Wiggins, the California Republican who defended Nixon until just three days before he resigned the Presidency in August 1974.

The GOP is long past Rep. Wiggins, who died in 2000, and the party is no longer cognizable to former loyalists like Stuart Stevens, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, among others. With few exceptions (i.e. Chris Christie and Liz Cheney) it behaves like a cult, more so than a party, even foregoing its entire platform, in 2016 and again in 2020, over to simply fall in line with whatever Donald Trump would like to do.

Twelve years ago, I wrote a lengthy essay entitled Stuck in Stupid which was driven by social science research explaining how gullible conservative voters were to misinformation, primarily from corporate-funded groups attacking health care reform and trying to discredit the science on global warming by branding it a hoax.

Of course, the planet has been engaged in a withering rebuttal since, including the coral-bleaching temperature (at or near 100 degrees) of ocean water off Florida as I write. But equally disturbing is the persisting influence of Americans who are ignorant or just plainly dismissive of facts that conflict with their beliefs. When confronted with evidence that their favorite facts are simply wrong, they respond by doubling down on their beliefs.

What we couldn’t see as clearly a decade ago, but which is clearly in sight now, is how submission to misinformation (i.e. the “Big Lie” that Trump won the 2020 election despite all evidence to the contrary) has become a tacit loyalty oath among Republican voters and candidates.

“Top Secret” and other classified documents found by federal agents in a search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago office in August of last year. (U.S. Justice Department photo, courtesy of Wikimedia Images)

All of which leads to a telling result, deep within an opinion poll released earlier this week by the Marquette Law School. It sits in the light of a remarkable filing, yesterday, by the special counsel in the Trump classified documents case. Trump had originally been indicted June 8th on 37 charges of violating federal laws. The special counsel now charges Trump with an additional violation of the federal Espionage Act and—with two of his employees— conspiring in an unsuccessful effort to destroy surveillance video subpoenaed by a federal grand jury.

As for the Marquette poll: aside from asking self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who they favor among the current GOP presidential candidates, (46% Trump, versus 22% for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) the pollsters asked all voters what they knew about the Mar-a-Lago classified document case.

More than two-thirds of both Republicans (69%) and Democrats (72%) said they’d heard or read “a lot” about the documents case involving Trump.

To the question of whether“classified documents” were involved, 95% of Democrats and 78% of Independents answered “yes.”

But 50% of Republicans answered “no.”

What’s telling about this seemingly odd polling result is that Trump himself has made numerous statements confirming he had classified documents moved from the White House to Mar-a-lago, and claimed, with no basis, that it was his right to do so. He also famously told FOX News’s Sean Hannity last September that he was entitled to have them at Mar-a-lago because he could declassify documents “even by thinking about it.”

So while nearly 70% of Republicans responding to the poll said they’d read or heard “a lot” about the documents case, half of them didn’t believe classified documents were involved. This even though nearly 200 classified documents were recovered; more than a hundred of which were marked “Secret” or “Top Secret.” This even though Trump has loudly proclaimed, multiple times, that he was entitled to have the documents, long after he left the White House.

Therein, by the numbers, is a shadow of the problem—it’s not stupidity so much as an unwillingness to accept facts that don’t conform to what a person would prefer to believe. You can have a cult or a theocracy with that sort of habit, but not a healthy democracy.

—tjc