A Washington Post headline calls it “an unusual turn,” but the fact that interviewees for jobs at the Republican National Committee are reportedly being asked if they think the 2020 election was stolen may be one of the least surprising facts of this news week. But though it’s unsurprising, it’s no less ominous, as it’s further evidence that Donald Trump is not running a presidential campaign so much as an insurrection disguised as a presidential campaign. By making his lies about purported Democratic treason in 2020 a litmus test for joining the RNC, Trump aims to make insurrectionism central to the party’s formal structure. It should never be considered anything but utterly disqualifying that Donald Trump has placed at the center of his re-election campaign the idea that he did nothing wrong in attempting a coup to stay in office based on the lie that the presidency was stolen from him. The myth of a stolen election is the fantasy on which his stance of innocence rests; by claiming an imaginary crime against America (and against himself), Trump licensed himself to commit any manner of real-world crimes (including violence) to re-gain power. January 6 and its accompanying offenses is the prime example of such criminality, but it would be naive to think that he isn’t prepared to commit even more in order to re-gain the White House and avoid the accountability that is still coming for him.
While asking prospective employees the question about a stolen election is also clearly a way for Trump to try to assure himself that the RNC only hires MAGA loyalists (or that those hired know they must adhere to even the most extreme tenets of the MAGA line), we can’t ever lose sight of the basics here. Those who reject the 2020 election results despite any evidence of fraud are not misinformed or blindly partisan: they are rejecting the results of a democratic election while offering the flimsiest veneer of plausible deniability.
At this point, unquestioning acceptance of the conceit that millions of Americans truly believe the 2020 election was stolen has become a central way for the media and Democrats to avoid reckoning more directly with the more ominous situation it hides: that millions of Americans have decided they don’t accept election results when they disagree with them. While not openly insurrectionary, as the vast majority of these people don’t reject Joe Biden’s authority as president (for instance, refusing to obey laws that he’s signed), it is nonetheless more than a matter of supposedly believing lies. When an ordinary person chooses to believe something to be false, when that thing has been established to be true by long-established, transparent standards, then that person is simply choosing to reject reality. In this case, of course, the reality being rejected is the idea that the presidential candidate who wins the Electoral College then becomes president. For an ordinary (i.e., non-politician) citizen, this is a lazy person’s insurrectionism, enabling a posture of righteous opposition to democratic rule without its adherents having to reckon with, or act on, the full consequences of their position. But for true insurrectionists like Donald Trump, it is nonetheless an enormous assist, providing mass support for truly heinous actions rooted in lawlessness and a will to power.