Fraud Commission Fades Away

Amidst the clamor surrounding the publication of Steve Bannon quotes characterizing Donald Trump as the mindless simpleton we already knew him to be, it was quietly announced by the Trump administration that the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity – widely known as the voter fraud commission, set up ostensibly to investigate Trump’s contention that millions of votes were cast illegally in the 2016 election -- was being disbanded. The president blamed “continuing legal challenges,” but the reality is that the commission never found any evidence of fraud -- certainly not fraud on the massive scale Trump spoke of -- and having met just a couple or three times and come to the quick conclusion that it had nothing actually to do, has now disappeared into the gloaming with barely a whimper.

Some months ago, Flyoverland made an offer to president Trump: Point us in the right direction and we will investigate and report on – and collect our Pulitzer prize for – the story of the century. That story is the one about the most massive voter fraud in the history of the Republic, as revealed by the president who said the popular vote count, which he was on the short end of by quite a bit, was wrong because as many as five million votes had been cast fraudulently. Our reasoning in making the offer was as follows: He must have a reason for saying that; he must know something; he must have some information, some evidence. Tell us or any news organization what that is – point us in the right direction, give us something, anything, to go on – and we will get to the bottom of it.

He did not take us up on our offer. That, of course, is because no such evidence existed and there was no large-scale voter fraud. It was simply something he made up. The commission was nothing more than a lame attempt to give legitimacy to Trump’s fantasies. As Senate leader Chuck Schumer put it: “The commission never had anything to do with election integrity. It was instead a front to suppress the vote, perpetrate dangerous and baseless claims, and was ridiculed from one end of the country to the other.”

This episode, though perhaps not as “sexy” as many of the dozens to hundreds of lies and scandals attributable to Trump, is instructive. It typifies his capacity for both self-delusion and for unashamed prevarication, not to mention his willingness to undermine vital American institutions for his own ends; and it serves as vivid testimony to the willingness of his more ardent followers to happily accept as truth whatever he says, no matter how frivolous or unsubstantiated.

I’m pretty sure that Trumpists, and Republicans in general, would not have accepted at face value the exact same claim, utterly evidence-free, if Hillary Clinton had made it: That five million fraudulent votes had cost her the election. Their howls of anger and ridicule would have been heard throughout the land.