For ten years, I worked as a professional LGBTQ activist, working primarily in religious communities during the peak of the same-sex marriage battles. Most of the work was extremely gratifying, but at many events I was cat-called, heckled, and interrupted. I was told that my relationship with my partner was the same as bestiality. And, to this day, I receive hateful messages telling me that I’m not a real Jew, not a real rabbi, not even fully human.
But during the many activist trainings I did during that period, I learned a central lesson: The point is not to persuade the haters (which is usually impossible) but to persuade the “movable middle” that you are more reasonable than they are.
I was reminded of this basic activist principle hearing the pro-Trump right’s responses to the State of Georgia’s indictment of Donald Trump. And I say: Bring it on.
ADVERTISEMENT
Because while those responses are red meat for the MAGA base, they are also profoundly unreasonable to anyone not already in their camp. They generally have three themes: first, that the indictments are all a political “witch hunt”; second, that Trump was just exercising his free speech rights to challenge an election; and third—most damaging to the Republican side—that the election really was stolen, rigged, or otherwise suspect in various ways.
It's that third point that is the weakest and yet Trump is still wholly committed to it, making it very hard for pro-Trump Republicans to disagree.
It is the foundation, really, of the whole argument: that there was good cause to doubt the election results, and even to take extreme actions in response. And, based on poll data, it is what the base firmly believes: that the Big Lie is true.
But in actuality, it is clearly, demonstrably, totally false. And thanks to the way the Georgia indictments are framed, this core question of truthfulness is going to be front and center in this most public of the Trump trials.
This is good for America—and for Democrats. It’s one thing for liberals to chant the words “Big Lie” over and over, but it’s quite another for the gory details of said Lie to get raked over in public.
Let’s look at just two examples, less well-known than Trump’s “find 11,780 votes” call, but indicative of the kind of nasty narratives that, if they become better known, are going to hurt Republicans in 2024.
First, consider the harassment of Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss by Trump’s team. It is now proven that Freeman and Moss did nothing wrong, and yet they were terrorized for months, including by Trump’s own associates.
On Dec. 10, 2020, Rudy Giuliani allegedly said that they were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they're vials of heroin or cocaine" at State Farm Arena (Act 56 of the RICO charge). That statement is false, racist, and hateful. It’s a lie, weaponized into harassment. It is not where the “movable middle” is.
Four days later, a lesser-known defendant, Pastor Stephen Lee, went over to “talk” with Freeman and associates of hers directly (Acts 87-89 of the RICO charge), seeking to tamper with a witness and “help” her. And Trump himself mentioned Freeman and Moss in his Jan. 2, 2021, call with Georgia officials, alleging without a scintilla of evidence that they fraudulently awarded 18,000 votes to Joe Biden.
Again, the MAGA base may lap this up, but normal people will be disgusted by it.
Second, consider the Jan. 7, 2021 (yes, one day after Jan. 6) shenanigans at the Coffee County Board of Elections (caught on camera) in which Trump’s agents, led by Sidney Powell, allegedly “stole data, including ballot images, voting equipment software and personal voter information,” and then copied Georgia’s statewide voting system software, which is supposed to be kept secure. They then removed ballots from the polling place (acts 142-155 of the RICO charge).
This is all obviously criminal conduct—not free speech, not politics as usual, but anarchic, criminal thuggery.
These two examples—there are dozens more, especially the ludicrously large (yuuuge, even) numbers of fraudulent votes Trump regularly threw around—are the kind of gory details that, drip by drip, will turn off anyone in the political center. It could even prove poisonous for some of the religious conservatives who made their Devil’s Bargain with Trump in 2016, but have come to reflect further upon it.
Trump’s backers can shout “witch hunt” all they want, but the point about witch hunts is that they didn’t have any real evidence (and were conducted by sexist extreme conservatives, of course). But this stuff is on tape; some is even on video.
Then there’s the MAGA claim that this is all just free speech and electioneering. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) recently said that Trump “had every legal right to challenge the results of the election.”
Well, sure—in court, maybe even in Congress. Which Trump did. But he had no right to confiscate voting machines, intimidate election workers, and cajole public officials to violate their oaths of office by throwing out certified election results. Those are all crimes—not mere speech, not legal challenges, and not political acts.
This kind of stuff is not going to play on Main Street. Like those pictures of boxes of documents in Trump’s bathroom, these accounts of Trump’s lies and his actions based upon them are more powerful than the niceties of the RICO Act. They show that Trump and his team acted like thugs, broke the law, and are not the victims of a witch hunt. That just isn’t so.
Trump’s base will never desert him. But most people will.
