The US Right Has Pretty Much Given Up on Making Arguments (Election Fraud Edition)
The news cycle this week included coverage of a tantrum that Donald Trump threw before he walked out of an interview with NBC's Kristen Welker. Trump was shouting about how the recent California primary elections were "crooked," because he was of the opinion that the vote counting took too long. There was plenty of material in that rant-filled interview for comedians and pundits to ridicule, but for my money, this brief exchange at the end perfectly captures the mindset not only of Trump but of his entire political movement.
Trump: They're cheating on the election.
Welker: What ... do you have evidence to support that?
Trump: All I have to do is look. All I have to do is look.
Well, since he repeated himself, we are all convinced! Seriously, however, this is no small matter, because that moment was only the latest reminder that Trump and his followers have abandoned the very idea that they need to present evidence and logic in order to try to persuade people. In the same news cycle, House Speaker Mike Johnson was equally stubborn in his obliviousness. Asked what evidence exists to prove Trump's claims, Johnson said that it "stinks to high heaven" and then actually said this: "Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream, it is impossible to prove." So, yeah, all I have to do is look.
My analysis below will move beyond the California primaries, but it is first worth pointing out that this new claim from Republicans -- that taking a long time to count ballots is proof of fraud -- is transparently disingenuous. After all, Trump's claims that the 2020 election results were rigged were based in part on changes in reported results over the space of hours the morning after the election (complaining about "morning vote dumps" in Michigan) that changed who was ahead, as newly tabulated ballots are often known to do. Their assertion that taking a long time to count votes is the evidence of fraud, therefore, is no more believable than Republicans' claims that they wanted abortion laws "returned to the states," or any of their other opportunistic grasping onto process arguments in lieu of defending their true motivations.
Even so, the editorial page for The New York Times took the bait with one of their typical "well, to be fair," efforts that ultimately support Republicans' dishonesty. They wrote that California's relatively slow counting "confuses ordinary voters and serves the interest of conspiracists, including President Trump, who spread lies about election fraud that is in fact virtually nonexistent." The editors then quoted outgoing California Governor Gavin Newsom -- a man who has a track record of cynically giving ground to Republicans when he feels like it -- as supposed proof that "even" Democrats should see the folly here: "We must acknowledge that the longer the voting count takes, the more mis- and disinformation spreads."
Again, the pace of counting does not "serve the interests of conspiracists" in any avoidable way, because there is always another conspiracy theory available to muddle any situation. In fact, we can move past even the dispositive example above re Michigan in 2020 and go completely to the end of the continuum: What would Trump and the Republicans say if final vote tabulations were released immediately upon the closing of polls? How did they do that so quickly? They didn't even provide interim results when different polling stations reported their results. What are they hiding?!?! The notion that long waits somehow give Trump more to complain about is silly, especially in light of his refusal to give up on his many 2020 claims.
As Trump said in 2016, he will not challenge election results IF HE WINS. It is not the process, it is the outcome, and the process arguments will be invented as needed.
Although people are rightly concerned that Trump is going to use this well-worn strategy to attack any Democratic victories in the 2026 midterms, the American right's embrace of "All I have to do is look" is in fact nearly everywhere. And when they (very occasionally) do go through the motions of offering something resembling an argument, as I will explain below, the effort is simply embarrassing.
Almost exactly ten years ago, I wrote, referring to the infamous (and famously evidence-unsupported) Laffer Curve:
It used to be that even an ill-informed politician would try to offer some logical chain of cause and effect, explaining how his policy ideas would make the world better off. ... For example, a politician might say that cutting taxes will increase economic activity, which will increase tax revenue by more than enough to make up for the lower tax rates.
Trump ... never bothers with an explanation. He simply skips to the end: 'Trust me, it will be great.' In fact, he not only dispenses with a step-by-step explanation, but he frequently does not even bother to tell us what the policy is that will make things great again.
Following the (Dear) leader, all of his minions have taken to making this same kind of unsupported assertion. Last summer, Trump's conscience-free economic advisor Kevin Hassett tried to buttress the case for Trump's firing of the commissioner of one of the country's most important statistical agencies, claiming that some government statistics had been "rigged." Poor Kristen Welker was also the person who was stuck trying to nail down that blob of Jello on Meet the Press, as one report explained:
When host Kristen Welker pressed Hassett for “hard evidence” that the numbers were “rigged,” as Trump claimed, Hassett first replied, “the revisions are hard evidence”—even though such revisions are, in fact, standard procedure. Later in the interview, Hassett added, “if you look at the number itself, it is the evidence.” And on Fox News Sunday, Hassett alleged that there are “partisan patterns” in the data, while offering no proof of that.
And there it is again. The number itself is the evidence! Like his boss, he believes that all he has to do is look. Arguments -- facts and logic -- are for suckers.
Is this conservative allergy to evidence and reasoning limited to elections and economic data? Of course not. In two recent columns, I discussed the National Football League's so-called Rooney Rule and the rise of bald-faced White supremacy on the right. I pointed out, for example, that Trump claimed last year that a plane crash had been caused by diversity initiatives. Evidence? Ha! And quoting a column that I wrote last year, I added this:
[T]he Trumpist right no longer even bothers to say that there might be people who are non-White men who are in fact qualified. As a presumptive matter, they attack anyone as per se unqualified who is a woman, a racial or ethnic minority, LGBTQ+, or any other group that they hate. I wrote: "Any person from a disfavored group is now deemed to be unqualified -- not even as a rebuttable presumption, but simply as a given fact of nature."
They do not need evidence of incompetence. All they have to do is look, and when they see anyone who is not a White man in a job, they are certain that the person was hired for bad reasons and is incompetent in the job.
Dorf on Law readers who went to law school almost surely recall the Latin term res ipsa loquitur, which is used in tort law and literally means "the thing speaks for itself." To be sure, as used in common law, that doctrine (though somewhat controversial) is tightly confined:
Res ipsa loquitur is a principle in tort law that allows plaintiffs to meet their burden of proof with what is, in effect, circumstantial evidence. The plaintiff can create a rebuttable presumption of negligence by proving that the harm would not ordinarily have occurred without the negligence of the defendant, that the object that caused the harm was under the defendant’s control, and that there are no other plausible explanations.
Trump and his gang have decided, however, that their conclusions based on casual inspection of the world (filtered through their toxic prejudices) are irrebuttable, and all of that other stuff about "no other possible explanations" is for weaklings.
As I noted above, however, very occasionally someone in Trump's world ventures to offer what at least has the form of an argument. I discussed this in some detail shortly before the 2024 election, noting that Trump's running mate was especially bad at making anything close to a persuasive argument, even though a generous interpretation of what he said could sometimes be framed as a syllogism. At best, however, Vance would offer post hoc fallacies.
When it comes to the Republicans' recent conspiracy mongering about the California primaries, however, Vance offered something even more inane. As The Hill reported:
“The problem here with this whole thing is, how is it that you had, you know, Karen Bass was in first place, Spencer Pratt was in second place, and then this other woman was in third place. You would expect these mail-in ballots to kind of meet that same basic pattern where, you know, number one would get the most votes, number two would get the second most votes, and so on,” Vance told Fox News’s Jesse Watters on his show.
Back in 2020, there were groups of pro-Trump protesters standing outside vote-counting facilities in Michigan and Arizona, with one group chanting "Stop the count!" and the other chanting "Count the votes!" Why? One group believed that counting additional votes could turn a Trump win into a loss, and the other group thought the opposite. Vance's argument-like claim from earlier this week is even more ridiculous than that, however, because what he is saying is that a subset of the votes will always have the same breakdown as the overall votes.
Why in the world would that be true? And if it were true, why would we ever finish counting the votes in any election? At some arbitrarily early point -- after 10,000 votes have been counted, or maybe 1000, or maybe 100 -- we would know who won. Statisticians would be astonished to learn about this universal fact of life. Who knew that we can "expect these mail-in ballots to kind of meet that same basic pattern"? J.D. Vance knew, that's who.
As I noted above, however, Vance somehow gets higher marks than everyone else in his cult, because rather than saying that he can see it with his eyes and needs no evidence, he is instead saying that there is evidence that we should have believed right away, allowing us to stop bothering to gather possibly confounding evidence. But at least he saw no need to lie about eating cats and dogs this time.
- Neil H. Buchanan