In support of his effort to prosecute Donald Trump for his attempt to subvert the 2020 election results, special counsel Jack Smith compiled a 165-page report detailing Trump’s actions, from casting doubt on the security of the election well before it occurred to fomenting the riot that unfolded at the Capitol.
The document, a redacted version of which was made public on Wednesday, was the third exhaustive public delineation of Trump’s actions. It was preceded by the investigation conducted by the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot. And, even earlier, it was preceded by the Trump’s public actions — his comments about fraud and exhortations for officials to subvert the results and his calls for people to come to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.
Put another way, while there were new details in the Smith compilation, there was no new theory of the case. And given that seeing Trump’s efforts unfold and hearing the House select committee’s presentation didn’t convince Republicans of Trump’s culpability, it seems that nothing will.
Consider the results of a poll conducted by Ipsos for Reuters earlier this year.
In that survey, Americans were asked whether various statements were believable, including some that were simple statements of fact. Respondents were asked, for example, whether “Trump called Georgia state officials in an attempt to get them to change the 2020 election outcome in Georgia in an effort to stay president.” This is not a question of opinion; it happened. We know it happened because The Washington Post reported that it happened. And not only did The Post report that it happened, we obtained audio of the call in which Trump does exactly what’s articulated.
About 6 in 10 Americans said that the statement presented in the poll was believable. Only 3 in 10 Republicans did — even though it happened.
There were other statements related to Trump’s effort to overturn the election, too. Republicans were consistently unlikely to describe those statements as believable — including one about Trump inciting the mob on Jan. 6, 2021.
Why don’t Republicans think the statement about Georgia — referring to a conversation in which Trump said that he wanted officials to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” — is believable? Perhaps in part because right-wing media hasn’t spent a lot of time talking about Trump’s actions. That includes limited coverage of the House select committee, and it includes less coverage of things like the Georgia call.
Trump’s request to the officials has often been summarized as his asking them to “find 11,000 votes.” Since January 2021, when The Post first reported on the call, there have been 475 15-second segments on the three most popular cable news channels in which those words appear. Only 44 of them were on Fox News.
When Fox News has covered the Georgia call, as it did more frequently in August 2023 at the time that Trump was indicted in the state, it has often done so in a way that’s overtly sympathetic to Trump’s position.
“The issue is not whether he wanted to overthrow it but did he believe that he won,” Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro said at the time of the indictment. “If he believed that he won, pursuing all of these avenues are okay for him because in themselves they are not illegal.”
“If you say, ‘Look, I need to find 11,000 votes,’” she continued, “that’s very different from saying, ‘I need you to find 11,000 votes somewhere.’”
On such split hairs are defenses built. The idea that Trump was justified in trying to subvert the results is a crucial component of Republican defenses of his actions — despite the lack of evidence that this belief was warranted and despite the evidence that Trump didn’t believe it at all.
Since the 2020 election, CNN has repeatedly polled Americans to evaluate their confidence in the results of the election. In January 2021, soon after the riot, about 3 in 10 Americans said they didn’t think the results were legitimate, with about a quarter indicating that they thought there was solid evidence they weren’t. In August 2023, about 4 in 10 said they thought the election wasn’t legitimate, with slightly fewer saying their belief was rooted in solid evidence.
Among Republicans, though, 7 in 10 have consistently said they thought the election wasn’t legitimate. The only change has been that, in January 2021, more than half said there was solid evidence to that effect. Now, far more are likely to say that this is only their suspicion.
Republicans believe (or want to say they believe) that the election was illegitimate, so they do. The lack of evidence doesn’t serve to dissuade that argument.
Trump’s supporters and members of his party have excused his actions from the outset. In January 2021, Monmouth University asked Americans whether they approved of the House impeaching Trump for his post-2020 efforts. Most Americans said they did — but only 3 in 10 Republicans agreed. In polling conducted by Pew Research Center earlier this year — after more than four years of additional evidence coming to light, about half of Republicans said Trump did nothing wrong in his efforts to subvert the last election.
This pattern is very much in keeping with polling over Trump’s presidency. Views of Trump’s actions didn’t change over the course of the Russia investigation or over the course of his first impeachment, with Republicans generally unmoved by the aggregation of evidence against him. The 2020 response was no different. The argument from Trump critics that his actions subverted democracy simply haven’t gotten traction from members of his party willing to excuse them.
The document compiled by Smith is historic, a thorough delineation of an effort by a political leader to undermine the results of a presidential contest. It is an outline of how his prosecution would unfold at a criminal trial.
But such a trial may never occur. Trump is a coin-toss from being reelected president, at which point he would almost certainly ensure that the Smith prosecution is dismantled. His attempt to retain the White House despite losing in 2020 didn’t work, but it also hasn’t prevented his supporters from being willing to return him to the White House after 2024.
