Betrayed voters turn on Trump as former prosecutor details how cynicism fuels his power

President Donald Trump “benefits from cynicism” as he erodes Americans’ faith in key democratic institutions, according to a prosecutor speaking with a conservative commentator.

“One of the things I think about when listening to voters is how Trump benefits from a certain kind of cynicism that has now taken root, which is that all politicians lie,” Andrew Weissman, a former prosecutor and author of the book “Liar’s Kingdom,” was asked by The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell. “And it gets tough sometimes to disaggregate between a politician spinning, trying to put a positive light on things, saying things about their opposition that are maybe overstated — versus something like "’the 2020 election was stolen, and we've got to do something about it, so we better march to the Capitol because if we don't fight like hell, we're not going to have a country anymore.’ How do you pull those apart?”

Weissmann responded that because he could not address every one of Trump’s 30,000 lies, he was able to dissect it by focusing on one example — the 2020 presidential election.

“Where it does start getting gray — and here is where having been both a prosecutor and a defense lawyer for longer than I care to say comes in — that is what the law does,” Weissmann said. “It has to be intentional. It cannot be a mistake. It also has to be material, meaning it can't be something trivial.” He argued that Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election meets all of those standards, and that the law needs to catch up with these cynical attempts to manipulate the public in bad faith.

“I tried to think of things that could be a statutory fix — something that could happen at the state level or the federal level. I deal with: could you pass a statute, and what kinds of things would it say?” Weissmann told Longwell. “I walk people through the argument as to why this is a good idea, what models there are, what we could do, and why I think it could pass constitutional muster.”

He also argued there are many institutions that need to be rebuilt.

“When I was thinking about how to rebuild — what structures have to change, what kinds of laws can you put in place — I was also thinking about what institutions have held up,” Weissmann argued. “And what has held up as a way of separating truth from fiction is what courts do, day in and day out. Frankly, the district courts right now are one of the last — no pun intended, Sarah — bulwarks of liberty. The kinds of things I'm talking about involve using the courts to help separate truth from fiction.”

He added, “I also spend a fair amount of time talking about the late-19th, early-20th-century idea of a ‘marketplace of ideas"’— this fictional marketplace where all ideas confront each other and come out in the wash. For a whole variety of reasons, that doesn't apply to factual issues; it applies to opinions. And two, I'm not sure we even have a functioning marketplace anymore in the way Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. envisioned, because we have such a balkanized information landscape — just these little bubbles. This is a nutshell; there's a lot more explication in the book as to how I piece this all together.”

Earlier in March, Longwell bluntly explained that she believes Trump has “betrayed” his own voters by failing to deliver on the affordability issues that matter most to them, a further example of his cynicism.

“When you have a Biden to Trump voter, they tend to have voted for Donald Trump for one specific reason, which is that he promised he was going to lower prices and make America more affordable. That's what they heard. That's what they believed,” Longwell explained to MS NOW anchor Nicole Wallace. “… [T]he way these voters process anything that Trump is doing is they just ask ‘is what he is doing making my life more affordable? Because that's what I hired him to do.’ And so, whether it's building the ballroom, whether it is the aggressive way that they are shooting Americans in the streets and going after immigrants, or whether it is this war with Iran, they see it as not what they were promised.”

“Betrayed” is also the term used by conservative podcaster Joe Rogan to describe Trump’s broken promise to those voters who supported him because he promised to keep America out of wars.

“This is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” Rogan said during the Tuesday episode of his podcast. “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”