Republicans Can Ditch the Big Lie at the Debate

But will they?

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Chris Christie is ready to tell GOP voters on August 23 that former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. God bless him, as President Joe Biden likes to say, and God bless the (probably mostly) Democrats who sent the former New Jersey governor enough small checks to get him to the debate stage so that he can tell this truth.

Christie is going to hammer Trump, in absentia, about everything. And he will hammer the other candidates about Trump. We expect those who have qualified for the debate to have readied their January 6th spin: It wasn’t an insurrection, but violence is never right, but many patriots were expressing heartfelt concerns, etc.

But of course, without the Big Lie, no one would have attacked the Capitol. And Trump wouldn’t have been indicted for trying to steal the 2020 election. Polling now shows the majority of Republican voters who were led astray by Trump’s malignant fiction has grown even larger.

And now Ron DeSantis seems suddenly to agree with Christie. This kind of thing can happen when you feel you have nothing left to lose. The other candidates may not feel as desperate as the Florida governor. Will they agree ?

Vivek Ramaswamy, Perry Johnson, Nikki Haley, Doug Burgum, Tim Scott, and anyone else who qualifies for the debate August 23 debate in Milwaukee will have to be prepared to say whether or not they believe Trump lost the 2020 election. Because the moderators, Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, will ask them.

When Trump lied about the election results in a June 19 interview with Baier, the host noted that recounts undertaken in all the swing states found “there was not significant widespread fraud.” Baier also told Trump “there were lawsuits, more than fifty of them by your lawyers, some in front of judges that you appointed, that came up with no evidence.”

Trump stammered that Baier should “take a look” at this and that. There was no evidence from Trump, just the drool string of random nouns and phrases he has used to titillate his voters with for coming on three years: “Truth the Vote,” and “stuffed ballots” and “fifty-one intelligence agents.”

Baier was blunt in their exchange. “You lost the 2020 election,” he said.

---

Tim Scott, the junior senator from South Carolina, and new darling of the GOP field, has admitted that Biden won the 2020 election.

On July 14, Scott answered a question about 2020 at a town hall and said that while there is cheating in every election, “I do not believe the election was stolen.” And on January 5, 2021, Scott said he would be voting to certify Biden’s election the following day because:

Republican governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country have upheld the results of their individual states’ elections. States have initiated recounts and audits with no significant change to the election results. The Electoral College has certified its results and still other judges, including judges and justices nominated by President Trump, have ended or declined to assert jurisdiction over these legal challenges.

Scott should be on the side of truth. But what he said last week after Trump was indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election makes it more likely Scott plans to layer some hot bullcrap over that cold truth. He sounded like someone begging for the veep slot:

As for DeSantis—who, by August 23 will be on his sixth campaign reboot—abandoning the Big Lie is a stunning turnaround for a guy who has been unwilling to even creep towards taking Trump on for more than a year, only occasionally dangling the phrase “culture of losing.” Just a few weeks ago, in May, he hit bottom when asked about the Big Lie, saying, “Well I look at the last however many election cycles, 2018 we lost the House. We lost the Senate in 2020 . . . Biden becomes president and he’s done a huge amount of damage, very unpopular in 2022 and we were supposed to have this big red wave and other than like Florida and Iowa I didn't see a red wave across the country.”

But last Friday, the day after Trump’s most recent arraignment, DeSantis made his move. While criticizing the prosecution—natch—and not walking back his previous indications that he would pardon Trump, DeSantis said of Trump’s election lies “all those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” and while “it was not an election that was conducted the way I think that we want to, but that’s different than saying Maduro stole votes or something like that. Those theories, you know, proved to be unsubstantiated.”

If former Vice President Mike Pence can make it to the debate stage the truth could end up with a quorum.

Or not.

DeSantis and Christie—and Burgum—know they won’t be working in a Trump administration, but others hope to. Nikki Haley, who has been flopping and flipping on Trump for eight years and who said in 2021 Trump wouldn’t run again (“I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far.”) has intentionally wormed around the Big Lie. She has said Trump absolutely believes he won in 2020, and so Trump isn’t lying. Perhaps she’ll be able to hold that line without having to render her own verdict.

Vivek Ramaswamy has said that January 6th was the outcome of “pervasive censorship,” and looks desperate to hold the line for Trump.

Perry Johnson has cited “incredible fraud” in the 2020 election, was disqualified from the Michigan ballot for fraudulent signatures when he ran for governor last year and then went on to endorse the election deniers that ended up on the ballot—including “Kraken” Kristina Karamo, who lost her bid for secretary of state and is chairing the state party and, essentially, obliterating it. Sounds like Johnson is Team Big Lie.

---

Last March the Washington Post noted that a report commissioned by Trump’s own campaign did not support his allegations of fraud and provided no evidence that the election was stolen. Because Trump didn’t like the findings (for which the campaign had paid more than $600,000) this report was kept secret. The Berkeley Research Group conducted its work in December 2020. The report, titled “Project 2020,” was eventually given to prosecutors working on the special counsel investigation relating to the 2020 election and January 6th.

These findings, and the effort to conceal them, have been met with silence from the GOP presidential field. And of course, Christie is the only candidate who qualified for the debate who is more disturbed by the evidence presented by the special counsel in Trump’s new criminal charges than Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Does all this outrage about a “two-tiered” justice system permit these Republicans to concede also that Biden did not “become president,” but indeed won the election?

It sounds like DeSantis wants to get there. But for those candidates who have admitted to themselves that the primary is likely over, that Trump will be nominated and that they want shiny new jobs in his party, telling the truth is dangerous. It is an article of faith in the GOP now that even voters who don’t believe this lie don’t want to move beyond it and take offense at those who call it out.

And even though candidates who stick by the lie undercut their own candidacies—because they can’t be “more electable” if Trump actually won the presidency the last two times—they are likely to stick with it, because it’s Trump’s party, and they live in it. And they don’t want to be exiled while they wait for him to ascend to the big Mar-a-Lago in the sky. They want careers in the GOP after he’s gone. Whenever that is.

But accepting the Big Lie comes with downstream consequences, and it’s forever. It means that Trump has never lost an election. It means that these candidates believe they are now living in an autocracy. It means that every criminal charge Trump faces is fraudulent. And it means those men and woman are not actually running against Trump, to defeat him, but to help him, and his party, going forward.