As Donald Trump returns to the White House this month, the US and the world are as divided of their opinions of him as ever. There stays an analogous disagreement over the outcomes of the 2020 election. Many Trump supporters adamantly imagine he ought to be completing his second term without delay moderately than starting it. Yet those that dislike him say this viewpoint is ridiculous and that it has been ‘debunked’ over and over.
With opinions sharply divided and bias and distrust on each ‘sides’, attending to the reality is difficult. However it is feasible to not less than understand why each points of view are held so strongly by each ‘side’.
Continuing suspicions
The resounding win by Trump in 2024 inflamed speculation concerning the last election moderately than dampen it down, especially regarding alleged ‘missing votes’ when comparing the Democratic support between the 2 elections.
Just following the election, the reported 2024 count for Harris was considerably lower than Biden’s in 2020, prompting a surge in speculation. For example, the conservative Christian commentator Dinesh D’Souza wrote this post on X which received 163,000 ‘likes’: “Kamala got 60 million votes in 2024. Does anyone really imagine Biden got 80 million in 2020? Where did those 20 million Democratic voters go? The truth is, they never existed. I believe we are able to put the lie about Biden’s 80 million votes to rest once and for all.”
However, in response to the newest numbers from the Associated Press, in 2024 Harris received just below 75 million votes, while Trump received 77.3m. The reason the initial vote was much lower was that they’d not all been counted.
This time round, Trump’s victory led to similar accusations of missing votes – but this time from Democrat supporters. Those who imagine there have been missing votes also allege that the reason behind the discrepancy is widespread fraud. But what’s the evidence of this?
Voter fraud?
A team around Trump alleged signs of fraud well before the 2020 election, including claims of rigged voting machines and an unusually large variety of mail-in ballots voting for Biden.
This wasn’t only a fringe belief. A 2021 survey by academics Gordon Pennycook and DG Rand found that “a majority of Trump voters in our sample – particularly those that were more politically knowledgeable and more closely following election news” believed that fraud was widespread and that Trump won the election.
After the vote, Trump and his allies filed many lawsuits in states where Biden won and likewise with the Supreme Court to challenge the result. The authorities were unanimous in rejecting these suits – though some Trump supporters imagine that this was on account of procedural issues moderately than the merits of the case, on account of supposed bias within the judiciary.
However, some claims about widespread voter fraud have did not be successfully defended in court from defamation lawsuits, the plaintiffs including Rudy Giuliani and Fox News. The former, once a celebrated New York mayor who helped the town through a few of its hardest periods, was ordered to compensate two election employees $148m for claiming they were involved in a rigged election. Conservative TV channel Fox News settled with a maker of the voting machines for $787m. With sums this massive at stake, if there have been good evidence of the fraud they allege, would they not have produced it?
But yet again, if the judicial system is just not trusted, even this may not persuade everyone. One of the explanations the assumption is so widely held is that on social media there have been umpteen photos and videos that purport to indicate officials tampering with the vote in a roundabout way. Politifact says it investigated quite a few of those claims and located all of them wanting. Numerous government and state organisations have also declared the 2020 election fair and valid.
The trouble is, many Trump supporters now not trust the media or government officials, because they’ve witnessed unprecedented levels of bias against Trump. There is loads of evidence of widespread dislike of Trump amongst those in authority – but they could argue that it’s justified. So, there’s a vicious cycle, because distrust on either side provokes behaviour that then further fuels distrust, and on and on it goes.
Bias in media
In 2021 a CNN worker, Charlie Chester, who thought he was on a date, was recorded describing his employer’s work as ‘propaganda’ for President Biden’s campaign. “Look what we did, we got Trump out. I’m 100 per cent going to say it, and I 100 per cent imagine that if it wasn’t for CNN, I do not know that Trump would have gotten voted out,” he says within the video. “I got here to CNN because I desired to be an element of that.”
Although this video received a variety of attention and exclamations of “I told you so!” from Trump supporters, Chester didn’t work in editorial, the a part of the news company that creates the content. So, while that will have been his perception of what was happening, it is just not evidence that the media company was deliberately attempting to skew the election, nor that Biden’s campaign was involved, as is typically portrayed.
Yet if many individuals within the media do have these sorts of firmly held anti-Trump beliefs, there are grounds to be concerned about possible bias in how they treat the news, which can in turn fuel claims by Trump supporters that they aren’t to be trusted.
The difficulty in assessing what really happened is illustrated within the bizarre saga of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Depending on who you suspect, news of it was suppressed by the Trump-hating media just before the election, or it was an overblown disinformation campaign. Some social media firms did suppress the story just before the election – would they’ve done the identical with questionable evidence of corruption by Trump? Again, the degrees of distrust on each side result in difficulties in drawing conclusions.
Mea culpa
Perhaps what we might be more sure of is when one in all the ‘sides’ explicitly admits to biased behaviour of their very own group. Not too long after the election results, an enchanting investigation right into a supposed “vast, cross-partisan campaign to guard the election” was described in Time Magazine. The goal of this alleged “conspiracy”, in response to author Molly Ball, was the noble goal of safeguarding democracy, and it was apparently sparked by suggestions well ahead of the vote that Trump would challenge the outcomes if he lost.
This “conspiracy” involved stopping Trump’s court challenges, increasing voting by mail, and pressuring social media firms to tackle “disinformation”.
“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one which each curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs,” the article says.
“Both surprises were the results of a casual alliance between left-wing activists and business titans … Both sides would come to see it as a type of implicit bargain – inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests – during which the forces of labour got here along with the forces of capital to maintain the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.”
The problem is, one man’s protection of democracy is one other man’s illegitimate restriction of legitimate routes to query possibly dodgy results. The article describes “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of data.”
It describes a concerted effort to extend voting by mail, and to challenge concerns from voters about this method. This succeeded. Only 1 / 4 of voters did it the normal way of casting their ballot in person.
But yet again we discover ourselves in a spot where to those that dislike or are terrified of Trump, these actions might be perceived as legitimate and legal means to stop an election from being wrongly usurped, while for individuals who support him, these actions look very different.
So who will we trust? And on what information are we basing these loyalties? Perhaps most significant of all in our troubled times, is looking for to succeed in out and understand the viewpoint of people that think very otherwise to us, moderately than perceiving them as merely bad actors who we must do all that’s vital to fight against. Only then do we’ve got hope of attending to the reality, and lessening the division that’s so damaging our societies and fuelling such questionable behaviour on each side.
Heather Tomlinson is a contract Christian author. Find more of her work at https://heathertomlinson.substack.com or via X (Twitter) @heathertomli.
