Almost exactly 5 years ago, we looked at a couple of Trump cronies, Jack Burkman and his sidekick Jacob Wohl, son of notorious rip-off artist far right psychopath David Wohl. Burkman and Wohl achieved some notoriety in right-wing circles for hiring people to falsely claim they had sex with or had some sexual incident with famous people who Trump hated. Back when I wrote about them the person they were maligning was Pete Buttigieg. Yesterday they agreed to a settlement for a 2020 voter suppression scheme targeting Black voters that included a million dollars in fines. This one was robo-calls to Black households during the pandemic to discourage them from voting by mail:
“Hi, this is Tamika Taylor from Project 1599, the civil rights organization founded by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl. Mail-in voting sounds great, but did you know that if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts? The CDC is even pushing to use records for mail-in voting to track people for mandatory vaccines. Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man, stay safe and beware of vote by mail.”
Another feather in NY Attorney General Letitia James’ cap. After they were found guilty in a similar scheme in Ohio, the judge sentenced them to spend 500 hours registering low- and middle-income voters in the Washington, DC. They are in the middle of another criminal case in Michigan and a federal case involving a $5 million fine from the FCC. I’m not saying all Trump cronies are like Burkman and Wohl, but I might as well, since they are. For conservatives, cheating and lying comes naturally… it’s a big part of why they turned to conservatism. And they assume everyone else cheats and lies as well… which makes them want to cheat and lie even more.
If you had to think of one single word to describe Trump as a lifetime character, “liar” would have to be a contender. Obviously “cheater” works too. But liar is the word the media should have been using— but never did— to describe him starting in 1973 when he lied about his company’s policy of racial discrimination against minorities trying to rent apartments in his buildings.
Yesterday, Washington Post fact checkers Glenn Kessler, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin wondered why Republicans believe Trump’s lies more than normal people do. They “sought to get a sense of the staying power of his lies— whether people are more or less likely to believe them over time and which lies prove the stickiest— as well as measure the value Americans place in a president’s honesty, however they define it.”
In 2018 they documented through a poll that “that most Americans, including Republicans, did not believe many of his most repeated claims.” And now they have a new poll showing “that remains largely the case, with an average of 28 percent of Americans believing Trump’s false claims tested in the poll. But Trump has made significant inroads in convincing Republicans that his lies are the truth. That applies to election integrity especially— the basis of Trump’s ‘big lie.’ But Americans appear to have diverged on the meaning of honesty itself.”
Among Republicans, fewer now say that Trump regularly makes misleading statements. Slightly more view him as more honest than they did in 2018, despite an extraordinarily large amount of evidence that Trump often does not tell the truth. During Trump’s presidency, the Fact Checker documented more than 30,000 misleading or outright false claims, and since he began his second campaign for the White House against Joe Biden, he’s introduced new falsehoods to his catalogue: Inflation is “almost 50 percent” under President Biden; “nearly 1 million jobs held by native-born Americans” have been lost to immigrants. In a single December interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump made 24 false or misleading claims in five minutes— one every 12.5 seconds.
… Six years ago, just about 1 in 4 Republicans (26 percent) agreed that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 election. Now, 38 percent of Republicans— and 47 percent of strong Trump supporters— believe that is the case. Among all Americans, belief in this false claim hardly changed because Democrats moved sharply in the opposite direction from Republicans. Trump often made this claim to justify his loss of the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, when the electoral college propelled him to the Oval Office.
Relatedly, in 2018, a little more than a quarter of Republicans, 27 percent, said they believed Trump’s claim that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election, benefiting Trump, despite substantial evidence assembled by intelligence agencies that it did interfere. Today, more Republicans, 37 percent, say they believe the false claim, despite the addition of a bipartisan Senate report concluding that Russia interfered, and criminal indictments of a dozen Russians. Overall, just about 1 in 5 Americans believe this.
Trump has convinced 70 percent of Republicans— and 81 percent of his strong supporters— that Biden won the 2020 election because of voter fraud, though not a single allegation has been proven. Slightly more than one-third of Americans overall believe this.
He has even convinced 51 percent of Republicans— and 58 percent of his most fervent supporters— that some cities tallied more votes than registered voters. This ludicrous claim is disproven simply by checking the statistics. Yet Trump has repeated it in rally after rally, often identifying Democratic strongholds like Detroit and Philadelphia.
False claims about election integrity are not the only ones that have taken hold.
While Biden has pushed forward with significant investment in green energy to combat climate change, the poll finds that Trump’s argument that global temperatures are rising mainly because of natural causes has gained traction with Republicans. Whereas one-third believed this in 2018, now nearly half (46 percent) think this is the case. As a result, the share of Americans overall saying human activity had little to do with climate change has climbed to 26 percent, from 19 percent in 2018.
…Americans who say Fox News is one of their main news sources are 13 percentage points more likely to believe the average false Trump claim than the public overall (41 percent versus 28 percent of Americans overall). People who rely on Fox News as a main source of news also are more likely to say Biden won the election because of voter fraud (58 percent to 36 percent among the public overall), whereas a majority of people who rely on all other news sources with sufficient sample sizes, including social media, say Biden won fair and square.
Meanwhile, college graduates are eight percentage points less likely to believe Trump’s false claims than those without college degrees, 23 percent versus 31 percent.
Interestingly, a majority of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, believe a false claim about the inflation rate— that it has increased for most products over the past 12 months. The annualized consumer price index was 6.4 percent in January 2023, compared to 3.1 percent for January 2024, the last release before the poll was conducted. Yet 72 percent of adults say the inflation rate has increased over the past 12 months, compared to 18 percent who correctly identified that the rate has fallen. Among Democrats, 63 percent say the rate has increased, compared to 85 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of independents.
Trump’s false statements are central to some of the criminal trials he faces as the presidential election nears, but his advocates have signaled they will claim the truth doesn’t matter. In the case pending in Georgia, where Trump is accused of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, his attorney recently argued that false claims would be protected under the First Amendment. “Falsity alone is not enough,” said Trump’s lawyer, Steve Sadow. “Clearly, being president at the time, dealing with elections and campaigning, calling into question what had occurred— that’s the height of political speech.”
For many of Trump’s supporters, however, his lies aren’t just protected political speech. They are true.