The Horrendous Disjunction
It means something different to vote for Trump in 2024.
On November 5th, voters will have a third chance to vote for Donald Trump in a general election, but this election differs from 2016 and 2020 in a critical way. If Alice votes for Donald Trump, then she belongs to one of two camps: Camp A believes that Trump won the 2020 election, that Joe Biden has held power illegitimately for the last four years, that there was a coup in which the Democrats stole executive power from the rightful winner. Camp B does not believe this. Though they likely think Biden should not have won, they concede that he nonetheless captured enough electors to become president. They believe, of course, that it should be Trump who holds this office in 2025.
This is the disjunction that a Trump voter faces in 2024, and it’s a horrendous disjunction to be in as a voter, a citizen, as a moral agent. Why? If Alice is in Camp A, and she believes the election was stolen, then she is contradicted by virtually every major media outlet in the United States, including Fox News. As was revealed during the Dominion Voting Systems suit against the network, Fox stars Laura Ingram, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson all expressed privately that there was not a shred of evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020. The comments should only be surprising in that they were made by Trump loyalists who spoke publicly to the contrary. Yet, their private statements track the facts: in six battleground states the Associated Press (AP) found 475 cases of voter fraud, a number vastly insufficient to have an impact on election results (recall that Trump asked the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” him 11,000 votes).
The AP study is commensurate with what Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky write in How Democracies Die (2018), where, “Levels of voter fraud in the United States are very low … and it is effectively impossible to coordinate national-level voting fraud” (the authors wrote this in reference to Trump’s 2016 election denialism where he maintains falsely that he won the popular vote against Hillary Clinton). 2020 was no exception. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security stated that the election was the most secure in American history.
A prospective Trump voter in Camp A contends that Trump won in 2020. Thus, Alice must believe that there’s a conspiracy to defraud Trump of office that extends to every major media outlet across the political spectrum, the Federal Government, and “almost 800 scholars of elections, parties and American state politics” (according to a study by the Harvard Kennedy School). Such would be the greatest conspiracy in the history of elections, requiring a farcical level of sophistication and secrecy. Such a conspiracy Trump himself refers to as the “Big Lie.” This term (notably operationalized in Hitler’s Mein Kampf) denotes a lie that is believable in virtue of its magnitude—and the incredulity that one would peddle a proposition so contrary to the facts. Recall here the Sagan Standard that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” As the media, universities, think tanks, and Trump’s own election lawyers showed—there is no such evidence (extraordinary or otherwise), that the 2020 election was illegitimate.
Camp A is horrendous to be in because it is against Truth. For the undecided voter, then, what of Camp B? If Trump did not win the 2020 election—as he continues to claim into the present (including during the first and only 2024 presidential debate)—then the Big Lie is his own, as Biden asserted in 2021. Alice is now willing to vote for a candidate who used every means available to undermine the most essential mechanism of the democratic process, and continues to propagate a falsehood that, as historian Timothy Snyder writes (drawing from Hannah Arendt’s theorizing), is large enough to “tear at the fabric of reality.” If Alice does not believe Trump won in 2020, then she is willing to vote for an insurrectionist, a traitor, a candidate who has argued for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” in light of the Big Lie.
Camp B voters have to accept the following: after losing the election in 2020, Trump and his legal team attempted to defraud tens of millions of people of their vote. He pressured the Department of Justice to deny the election’s legitimacy, launched sixty-two lawsuits across several states to overturn the election results, petitioned the Supreme Court to change their selection of swing state electors (the court, despite being packed with three of his own right-wing appointees, promptly declined the case), organized a slew of 84 fake electors, strong-armed his own Vice President to block certification, told a gang of over 2,000 loyalists to “fight like hell” on the Capitol steps, and said, “so what?” as they stormed the White House. If Alice votes for Donald Trump in 2024, she votes for someone who is against free and fair elections and who tolerates, if not encourages, political violence.
With multiple stories, exposes, and op-eds published daily about Donald Trump, it's easy for an undecided voter to become desensitized, overwhelmed, or just stuck in election headlights. The horrendous disjunction makes things simple. A prospective Trump voter is either of Camp A or B. If they are of Camp A, they believe the 2020 election was stolen. They are then, in effect, anti-reality, anti-reason. If they are of Camp B, they are anti-democracy. They are willing to vote for a treasonous felon who continues to “tear at the fabric of reality” by telling a lie that is so large it contradicts personal experience, empirical evidence, and a tried and tested institutional process. They are willing to vote for an insurrectionist who used the weight of executive office to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, and has suggested he would do so again in the future. The disjunction should be as embarrassing as it is inescapable to a voter, and the conclusion is glaring— deny the disjuncts. Vote against conspiracism, autocracy, and a second Trump presidency.