Donald Trump as the Pied Piper

OR: It's not a cult? (Part 342)

As a kid, you probably heard the story of the Pied Piper.

He was hired by a town with a rat problem. He played his magical flute and lured the rats out of the town. Problem solved!

Except there was a much darker element to the story that most people don’t remember (or never learned). The town didn’t want to pay the Pied Piper for services rendered. So, he used his alluring tune to attract the town’s children to follow him. They did — and disappeared forever.

Pretty terrifying stuff!

The message, of course, was that we — kids and adults — should beware someone peddling an attractive tune. That we shouldn’t blindly follow someone just because what they were saying appealed to us.

Which brings me to a new poll from the Washington Post, which tests a series of lies peddled by Donald Trump over the course of his time in public life. The results are proof positive of the former president’s hold over his base — and their increasing disconnectedness from established facts and objective truth.

As the Post concludes based on the results:

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.

That’s an understatement! Let’s go through some of the specific numbers in the poll because they are a wow.

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1. Russian interference in the 2016 election. Overall, a majority of Americans (55%) say it is true that Russia interfered in that election. But, among Republicans, more say that Russia DID NOT interfere in the election (37%) than say it did (35%). That 37% is a significant increase from 2018 when in a Washington Post poll 27% of Republicans said they did not believe Russia interfered in the election. It’s hard not to see that increase as a direct result of Trump’s near-constant insistence that “Russia, Russia, Russia” was a hoax — and that there was no evidence that the country interfered in the election.

THE FACTS: In 2020, the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee released a nearly-1,000-page report that said that not only did Russia actively seek to interfere in the 2016 election but they did so with the express purpose of helping Trump win.

As the New York Times wrote of the report:

It provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary.

The Senate report was largely consistent with the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller, who was tasked with exploring Russia’s role in the election. Mueller detailed a series of interactions between Russian officials and the Trump campaign and noted that the Republican’s campaign was aware of the Russian interference efforts and welcomed them. (Mueller also concluded there was “insufficient evidence” to charge Trump or his campaign with engaging in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians.)

2. The 2016 election was fraudulent. Less than one in four Americans (23%) believe that there were “millions” of fraudulent votes cast in 2020. Republicans, however, are much more willing to believe that idea — with 4 in 10 saying that statement is true. (Just 32% say that the 2016 election was free and fair.) And, again, the number of Republicans who believe the election was stolen has increased substantially over the past six years.

THE FACTS: There has been no evidence found of “millions” of illegal ballots being cast in the 2016 election. As the Washington Posted noted in December 2016:

As of writing, there are four demonstrated examples of people committing voter fraud during the 2016 general election. That's 0.000002 percent of the ballots cast in the race for the White House — if they counted, which they won’t.

Also worth noting: The national commission convened by Trump in 2017 to look into voter fraud disbanded without making any conclusions (or close to it) about fraudulent ballots.

3. Some cities tallied more 2020 votes than people who live in the cities. A majority (51%) of Republicans believe this claim to be true. And it’s not difficult to figure out why. Trump has spent the years since the 2020 election insisting that in big cities across America more people were counted as having voted than actually reside in the city.

Here’s just one of MANY examples:

THE FACTS: Trump’s claims are provably false. Reuters did a nice job of breaking down the numbers here. To take just one city, Detroit, the numbers look like this: 670,000 people live in Detroit. In 2020, 250,138 ballots were cast in the city. Like, it’s not close to being true.

To me, these numbers are proof positive that the best way to understand the current GOP is less as a political party and more as a cult of personality built around Trump.

Just one more example from the Post poll to prove this point: Just 38% of Republicans agreed that Trump regularly makes misleading statements. Almost 6 in 10 (59%) said he does not do so.

Which is simply wrong. The Washington Post counted more than 30,000 false and misleading claims made by Trump in his four years as president. Trump’s relationship with truth has been proven, over and over again, to be a casual one at best.

Republicans now believe that what Trump says is true — facts be damned. He is their truth.

Which has always been his plan. I still think one of the most revealing quotes of his presidency is this one from 2018 (bolding is mine):

“Stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

What’s clear at this point is that it has worked. Maybe even better than Trump even dared to hope.

He plays his flute and his followers trail behind him. Let’s just hope it doesn’t end the way the Pied Piper fairytale did.