Donald Trump *knew* his election conspiracy theories were bullshit

Proof.

These two paragraphs — from a Washington Post story by Josh Dawsey — are a wow:

Former president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral-fraud claims but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined were voter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court.

One of the central debates in the wake of the 2020 election (and still today) is whether Trump actually believes there was widespread voter fraud that cost him the race or whether he simply continues to cry wolf because a) he can’t accept defeat and/or b) he believes it to be a good thing for his politics.

This story suggests that Trump has actual evidence that his claims — which he continues to make on an almost-daily basis! — are, in fact, bunk.

The fact that NONE of the findings from the outside group report were released — either to the public or in any of the various court challenges Trump’s campaign filed — are a telling indicator of the lack of there there.

There’s another line in Dawsey’s story that jumped out at me too It’s this: “The work was carried out in the final weeks of 2020, before the Jan. 6 riot of Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol.”

So, Donald Trump KNEW —at least according to an outside report commissioned by his campaign — before January 6 that the claims he was making about the election being stolen simply weren’t born out by the facts.

(From the WaPo story: “Senior officials from Berkeley Research Group briefed Trump, then-chief of staff Mark Meadows and others on the findings in a December 2020 conference call, people familiar with the matter said.”)

And yet, over that same time, he repeatedly pressured then Vice President Mike Pence — as well as other state election officials — to alter or disqualify the results of the election so that he might have a chance to win.

He repeated those lies — and, yes, the Dawsey report confirms Trump knew they were lies — to a raucous crowd who gathered in Washington (at Trump’s behest!) on January 6, 2021.

“We will never give up,” Trump told the crowd that day. “We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. We won this election, and we won it by a landslide. This was not a close election.”

And, even after the ensuing riot at the U.S. Capitol, Trump clung to the idea that the election had been stolen.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he tweeted. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

At the time, those words seemed unconscionable. The U.S. Capitol had been overrun. People had died. More than a hundred police officers had been injured.

In light of the news in the Washington Post report, the picture looks even worse for Trump. Not only did he encourage and praise the rioters, but he did so fully aware that what he was saying had been directly disputed by the report his own campaign had commissioned.

The most charitable read on all of this for Trump — and it’s a stretch — is that he simply didn’t believe the outside report that made clear he had not, in fact, won the election.

Trump does live in a self-affirmation bubble. He ostracizes any advisor who doesn’t agree that he is a) always right and b) the best. Which means it’s possible that no aide was willing to challenge Trump when he made claims about the election that were proven false by the report.

The more likely explanation of Trump’s behavior in the wake of the report is that he simply didn’t care what it said because the findings were in conflict with what he wanted to be true.

In Trump’s world, there is only winning and losing — and he is never, ever a loser. He will go to great lengths to make himself a winner, facts be damned.

That win-at-all-costs mentality appears to be what’s at work here. What we now know is that Trump was confronted with facts that made clear his election fraud claims were not true. For whatever reason (and we may never know exactly why) he ignored them.

And, in ignoring them, he helped fuel a riot — and a continued movement of election denialism. Which, wherever you land on the partisan spectrum, is the opposite of leadership.