WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Allegiance to a lie has become\u00a0a test of loyalty to Donald Trump\u00a0and a means of self-preservation for Republicans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump\u2019s discredited allegations about a stolen election\u00a0did nothing to save his presidency when courtrooms high and low, state governments and ultimately Congress \u2014 meeting in the chaos of an insurrection powered by his grievances \u2014 affirmed the legitimacy of his defeat and the honesty of the process that led to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now those \u201cBig Lie\u201d allegations, no closer to true than before, are getting a second, howling wind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Republicans are expected to believe the falsehoods, pretend they do or at bare minimum not let it be known that they don\u2019t. State Republican leaders from\u00a0Georgia\u00a0to\u00a0Arizona\u00a0have been flamed by Trump or his followers for standing against the lies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Only a select few Republicans in Washington are defying him, for they, too, know that doing so comes with a cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Liz Cheney, lifelong conservative and daughter of a vice president once loved by the Republican right while earning the nickname Darth Vader, was willing to pay it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHistory is watching,\u201d the Wyoming congresswoman wrote as House Republicans prepared to strip her of her No. 3 leadership position this coming week over her confrontation with Trump. \u201cRepublicans need to stand for genuinely conservative principles, and steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everyone enmeshed in Trump\u2019s relentless election claims agrees a \u201cBig Lie\u201d is at the heart of the matter. President Joe Biden says so. Cheney said so.\u00a0Dominion Voting Systems\u00a0alleges in a massive lawsuit that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani \u201cmanufactured and disseminated the \u2019Big Lie.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump tried to appropriate the phrase by turning it against his accusers, a pattern from his presidency when he railed against \u201cfake news\u201d after having his own called out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!\u201d he said in a statement last week, delivered as if by force of proclamation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump led his party in an election that cost Republicans the presidency and their Senate majority while leaving them short of taking over in the House. For all that, the party\u2019s brute-force Trump faction is ascendant as Republicans place their bets on the energy and passions of his core supporters in the approach to the midterm elections next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That bet requires a suspension of disbelief when Trump makes his fantastical claims about a rigged election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis message is working,\u201d said former Republican Rep.\u00a0Denver Riggleman, driven from Congress by a Trump-aligned opponent in the party\u2019s nomination race in his Virginia district last year. Riggleman pointed to strong local fund-raising success and poll numbers for Trump loyalists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf you\u2019ve got to say things you don\u2019t believe in, as long as that leads to a win, that\u2019s what\u2019s most important,\u201d he told MSNBC. \u201cIf you think you can win by fanning these flames of disinformation, why wouldn\u2019t you do that?\u201d He added: \u201cIf you have no integrity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the running to replace Cheney in the House GOP leadership,\u00a0Rep. Elise Stefanik\u00a0of New York in recent days endorsed Trump\u2019s false claims of voting fraud and of a\u00a0ballot recount\u00a0being conducted in Arizona\u2019s Maricopa County by a company whose leader has shared unfounded conspiracy theories about the election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Artifice unfolded in Florida as Republican\u00a0Gov. Ron DeSantis\u00a0staged a fake signing ceremony Thursday on Fox News for a bill he actually signed elsewhere. The bill imposes new voting restrictions to fix problems state officials acknowledged haven\u2019t really been found, but might be in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Republicans are pushing voting curbs in multiple states as well as the federal level even as state leaders have pronounced Trump\u2019s case baseless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey can\u2019t change the 2020 election but they can use it as a predicate for new restrictive voting laws,\u201d election law scholar Richard Hasen of University of California, Irvine, said of the Trump loyalists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s extremely troubling for American democracy and undermines voter confidence in the integrity of the election process. Very dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump has been busy resurfacing election claims he\u2019s aired countless times before. They\u2019ve been systematically debunked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a statement Friday, Trump asserted: \u201cAt 6:31 in the morning on November 4th, a dump of 149,772 votes came in to the State of Michigan. Biden received 96% of those votes and the State miraculously went to him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No vote dump happened. The morning after November\u2019s election, Trump allies shared a map of Michigan that appeared to show Biden getting a huge spike of votes in an update. But the online news organization that was tracking results and published that map confirmed the same day it had made a data error and corrected it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump went on: \u201cLikewise, at 3:42 in the morning, a dump of 143,379 votes came in to the state of Wisconsin, also miraculously, given to Biden. Where did these \u2018votes\u2019 come from?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nothing nefarious here, either. Biden\u2019s early-morning comeback was simply the result of absentee and early votes being counted in Wisconsin\u2019s largest city and reported at once. Milwaukee counts absentee ballots in one centralized location and reports the results in a batch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Election officials finished counting the city\u2019s roughly 169,000 absentee ballots and uploaded the results about 3 a.m. after Election Day. Milwaukee police then escorted the city\u2019s elections director to the county courthouse to deliver thumb drives with the data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The outstanding ballots at that point overwhelmingly broke for Biden. A Democrat winning in a big city surprises no one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Utah a week ago,\u00a0Sen. Mitt Romney\u00a0was roundly booed by members of his party, while prevailing in a censure vote, for criticisms of Trump that hecklers called treasonous. Romney voted in both of Trump\u2019s impeachment trials to convict him; Cheney split her decision in the two House impeachments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For four years Mike Pence epitomized the loyal vice president. But his pro forma certification of Biden\u2019s victory Jan. 6 put him on the outs with Trump and clouded his political future, though he had no authority under the Constitution, congressional rules, the law or custom to stand in Biden\u2019s way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In one of his broadsides last week, Trump assailed Cheney, Pence and labeled Sen. Mitch McConnell \u201cgutless and clueless\u201d in one go. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, voted for Trump\u2019s acquittal but pronounced him \u201cpractically and morally responsible\u201d for provoking the Jan. 6 insurrection, drawing the ex-president\u2019s enduring enmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since then, McConnell and Pence have turned the other cheek. Darth Vader\u2019s daughter didn\u2019t. But at the moment, the force seems to be with Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
___<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in Seattle and Hope Yen contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Allegiance to a lie has become\u00a0a test […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":464,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":465,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions\/465"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}