Trump is peddling 'Big Lie Two' and 'cynical people' are buying it: analysis

Former President Donald Trump is peddling "Big Lie Two," and "has been hawking this one for a while, too," Michael Tomasky reports in Monday's New Republic.

"But it has been, to my mind, oddly little remarked-upon," Tomasky says. "That needs to change: Big Lie Two is more insidious and dangerous than Big Lie One, for two reasons. First, it has nothing to do with the settled past, but rather with the unsettled present and future. And second, because unlike Big Lie One, a majority of Americans believe it."

Tomasky explains, "The lie is that the indictments against Trump represent a collective effort to stop him from running for president. Trump talks of this all the time; 'election interference' is the phrase he often uses. They can't stop me legitimately, he says—they know I won in 2020, and they know I'll win again, so this is how they're trying to block me."

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Tomasky points out that like the OG Big Lie, Big Lie Two is "not true. What's true is this. Credible evidence has emerged on a number of fronts that Trump may have broken the law: that he absconded with boxes of sensitive, classified documents to Florida; that he approved a hush-money payment to a woman with whom he'd had sexual relations; that he tried to influence officials in Georgia to rig the 2020 election; and that he led or directed an insurrection against the government of the United States."

While Trump "is presumed innocent until proven guilty in all these matters," Tomasky continues, "in each of them, there is ample enough evidence of guilt on these fronts for prosecutions to proceed, and a lot of that evidence is, as Orwell might put it, right in front of our noses." Therefore, Tomasky posits, "What prosecutor would not bring charges in these cases?"

Tomasky also laments that despite the burden of proof being on the side of the prosecutors, polling indicates that "most people don't believe it."

Tomasky notes that "the depressing reality is that three out of five Americans apparently believe that these indictments are politically motivated. About half of those, probably a little more, believe every word Trump says. I suspect some portion are Democrats—31 percent of whom agreed with the overall majority—who think they're political and simply don't disapprove. But a lot of them are jaded, cynical people who think everyone's corrupt."

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That pervasive idea "maybe the key question" in next year's election, Tomasky warns, recalling that he "wrote two weeks ago that Trump's upcoming trials aren't a distraction from his campaign; they are his campaign. If that proves to be correct, then whether swing voters see these prosecutions as legitimate or politically motivated may go a long way toward determining the outcome."

Tomasky assesses that although the evidence is heavily stacked against Trump in each of the criminal cases, "it's tragic from a democratic perspective that so many people believe something that isn't merely untrue, but is the opposite of the truth. Trump is being prosecuted because of what he did, not because of what he is doing today or might do tomorrow."

Tomasky concludes, "If people can't see this utterly lawless man for who he is, or if they allow their cynicism about the system to overpower their distrust of him, then we will wake up next November 6 counting our brittle democracy’s numbered days."

Tomasky's full analysis is available at this link.