Trump institutionalizes the 'Big Lie'

President Donald Trump is still fighting the 2020 campaign, the one he lost but claims he won, by seeking to institutionalize the falsehoods that constitute its legacy.

It’s part of his campaign to retaliate politically for past grievances, real and perceived, and rewrite the history of the 2020 election. It ignores the fact that multiple state and federal courts rejected his false contentions that he won and, if he did lose, Democrats rigged the result.

With his encouragement, the Republican-controlled House last week passed legislation requiring that all voters in federal elections provide evidence of citizenship, though there is no evidence more than a handful of non-citizens ever sought to vote.

If the Senate agrees, it would enact one of the key steps Trump urged in a sweeping executive order. It directed states to require all voters to provide “documentary proof” of citizenship and demanded they refuse to accept mailed ballots received after Election Day, a practice he claims somehow enables Democrats to rig the results.

In addition, prospective administration officials have been questioned to ascertain they believe Trump’s false characterization of the 2020 election and his defense of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a failed effort to keep Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory.

Recently, one nomination was withdrawn upon disclosure the prospective nominee – chosen to head the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management – had criticized the Jan. 6 demonstrators, many of whom Trump pardoned on his first day in office.

In a new low even for him, Trump directed his Justice Department to investigate possible treason charges against two former government officials whose primary offense seems to be having vouched for the honesty of the 2020 count.

Meanwhile, his choice as U.S. attorney in Washington, D. C. -- himself the lawyer for some Jan. 6 demonstrators -- launched an investigation of the prosecutors who brought the charges that produced the conviction of hundreds of demonstrators for assaulting law enforcement officers and damaging government property while rampaging through the Capitol.

To call such efforts unprecedented minimizes the extent they violate our nation’s basic principles by seeking to prosecute individuals for their political beliefs and prosecutors for performing their duties. Trump is also destroying the Justice Department’s traditional independence and overriding the constitutional provision giving states control of elections.

Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, herself a 2020 election denier, made clear she sees herself as the prosecutorial arm of the Trump White House, rather than an independent advocate for the people.

An underlying irony is that the Trump administration is trying to infringe on the power of states to set election requirements at a time it is demolishing federal agencies like the Department of Education and the Federal Emergency Management Administration in the name of returning power to the states.

In his executive order, Trump declared, without evidence, that “the United States now fails to enforce basic and necessary election protections.” He said new steps are needed “to prohibit States from counting ballots received after Election Day or prohibit non-citizens from registering to vote.”

His order would require prospective voters to show a passport, driver’s license or other government-issued identification card, something millions of younger and poorer Americans don’t have. It would require states to show within 180 days they have taken steps to implement new requirements or face loss of federal election support.

Though non-citizens are already forbidden to vote, federal courts have blocked state efforts to add explicit citizenship requirements for voting.

Trump also called for increased cooperation between state and federal agencies to prosecute instances of election fraud, though past studies by Republican attorneys general in Texas and Kansas and in the U. S. Justice Department failed to show more than minimal examples of fraud.

He also would give Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” unprecedented access to voter files as part of the effort to eliminate alleged voter fraud.

At least four lawsuits have already been filed to challenge Trump’s executive order, including one by a coalition of voting groups and another by 19 Democratic state attorneys general that termed it "an unconstitutional attempt to seize control of elections" that could disenfranchise millions.

In separate orders, Trump called on the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to probe possible prosecution of Christopher Krebs, who was DHS’ top cybersecurity official during the 2020 election, and Miles Taylor, its former chief of staff and author of a 2018 article about resistance to Trump’s policies among government officials.

The order accuses Krebs, who rejected Trump’s fraud claims in the 2020 election, of “unauthorized dissemination of classified information.” Trump called him “a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government authority.” He said he thinks Taylor is “guilty of treason, if you want to know the truth.”

Meanwhile, Edward Martin, Trump’s choice as acting U.S. attorney in Washington, has been accused by critics of dismissing charges against a Jan. 6 defendant he represented as a lawyer and firing the prosecutors who brought many of the charges stemming from the Capitol insurrection.

Together, these steps constitute Trump’s institutionalization of the “big lie,” the false contention he really won the presidential election he lost. It seems a long way from those days after the 2020 election when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell saw “no reason for alarm” when Trump delayed acknowledging his defeat – and most other top Republicans agreed.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.