Tag: Big Lie
What’s at Stake for Election Workers
Poll workers serve an essential, if usually uncelebrated, role in American democracy. Organizing and tabulating is the basic business of elections. Or, it was until 2020.
When then–President Trump refused to accept his loss and spread falsehoods about a stolen election, vote-counters were among the first people to face blowback. Poll workers endured combative protestors, threats, and harassment while completing their work. In the two years since, the Big Lie has only grown more central to the Republican brand. In
How Hitler’s Enablers Undid Democracy in Germany
The short-lived Weimar Republic—which spanned the years after Germany’s defeat in World War I until 1933, when Hitler came to power—has become a paradigmatic example of democratic collapse. That has brought it renewed attention at this moment in America, when democracy is under threat from illiberal, would-be-authoritarian forces. We should rightly be suspicious of facile comparisons, especially the casual use of fascism as an imprecise epithet, yet Weimar’s fate provides us with some instructive parallels and important warning signals.
Liz Cheney, the Republican From the State of Reality
LARAMIE, Wyo.—Liz Cheney will probably lose her job on Tuesday, in large part due to her crusade against Donald Trump. Trump will surely taunt her as a big RINO loser, but Cheney has no plans to end her fight against him. She is already looking past her anticipated defeat here and into a future that could include—I suspect—a primary challenge to the former president in 2024.
“It’s clear that our party is really sick right now,” Cheney told me when
Defending Democracy Is No Longer Popular Within the GOP
The next few weeks will likely answer the most crucial question that emerged from last year’s insurrection by supporters of Donald Trump: Can one political party defend American democracy on its own?
In the days after the January 6 attack, it appeared possible that many Republicans would join Democrats in a cross-party coalition to defend democracy against the autocratic threat. But instead, Trump has consolidated his control over the GOP, led a movement to purge Republican elected officials who
The Steele Dossier and the New Trump-Russia Denialists
If Donald Trump had been supported only by people who affirmatively liked him, his attack on American democracy would never have gotten as far as it did.
Instead, at almost every turn, Trump was helped by people who had little liking for him as a human being or politician, but assessed that he could be useful for purposes of their own. The latest example: the suddenly red-hot media campaign to endorse Trump’s fantasy that he was the victim of a