The timing was apt, if unintended: Just a day before we got the news Tuesday about the latest indictment of Donald Trump — setting up the most momentous legal case in U.S. history, over his unprecedented attempt to overturn an election — we also got polling evidence of the damage Trump’s election lies have done. Not “alleged” lies, as we say of criminal charges yet to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and not “alternative facts,” but his actual lies.
But first, the indictment: United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
A grand jury found probable cause to charge that the disgraced former president perpetrated three criminal conspiracies: to reverse seven states’ 2020 election tallies favoring Joe Biden, to obstruct Congress’ certification of the presidential result on Jan. 6, 2021, and to deprive Americans of their right to vote and have their votes counted.
From its first page, which says “the Defendant” — Trump — “spread lies” about nonexistent voting fraud that he claimed, and still claims, cost him re-election in 2020, the 45-page document is replete with examples of his deceit. Trump lied to his advisers and his lawyers, to Republican state officials and members of Congress and, most heinous of all, to American citizens.
His constant mendacity, the document asserts, was intended “to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”