Democrats will spend the following 4 years debating why the occasion suffered a sweeping defeat final week. Possibly it was inflation, or the tradition wars, or Joe Biden’s hubris, or podcasts, that drove voters in each swing state to the Republican presidential nominee. Not less than one principle, nevertheless, can already be put to relaxation: Elon Musk didn’t “steal” the election for Donald Trump.
Within the weeks and months main as much as the election, Republican officers and operatives architected a second “Cease the Steal” marketing campaign, able to deploy ought to their presidential candidate lose. Musk laid a lot of this groundwork himself, as an illustration by aggressively selling the false narrative that the Democrats had introduced foreigners into the US to vote illegally, amongst different falsehoods. But following Trump’s election, it was the left sowing doubts: “#donotconcedekamala” and “Trump cheated” each trended on X. One publish on Threads learn, “20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their very own,” and pointed to Musk, Peter Thiel, and Vladimir Putin as doubtless culprits. “If anybody might fund a large election fraud scheme it’s Elon musk. He additionally has motive,” Dean Obeidallah, a progressive radio host, posted to Threads and X on Friday. Such posts have been seen tens of tens of millions of occasions.
There may be no proof to assist these claims—however they’re nonetheless essentially totally different from the unique “Cease the Steal” motion. Democratic management, for instance, shouldn’t be repeating these conspiracy theories, neither is there a coordinated try to amplify, validate, or act on them. (Obeidallah himself ultimately clarified his place, writing on his Substack yesterday that though skepticism is wholesome, “there may be at present no credible, goal proof of fraud or another legal conduct” suggesting that the end result was illegitimate.) In reality, the 2024 election was by all accounts extraordinarily safe. There is no such thing as a proof that international interference affected the outcomes, nor did any home conspiracy materially harm election administration. “Our election infrastructure has by no means been safer,” Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company, mentioned in a assertion on November 6. “We’ve no proof of any malicious exercise that had a cloth influence on the safety or integrity of our election infrastructure.” High officers in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, all key battlegrounds, have mentioned the election was protected, free, and truthful.
That hasn’t stopped some Democrats from implying in any other case. Musk, as considered one of Trump’s most vocal supporters and an especially on-line enemy of the extraordinarily on-line left, has grow to be an apparent goal. Possibly the world’s richest man hacked the election along with his Starlink satellite tv for pc community; perhaps Democratic ballots had been systematically not counted; even when the mechanism is unclear, the math isn’t mathing. Even when such suspicions are raised in good religion, they’re counterproductive. Musk—who’s now shut sufficient to Trump to have joined him on a latest name with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—is harmful. His willingness to amplify brazen lies as a way to assist advance the end result he wished was on show for months main as much as the election. However the misinformation about him or any main Republican determine stealing the election obscures and diminishes the precise risk at hand: The authoritarian bent in American media, enterprise, and politics that Musk represents has profoundly warped many People’ political discourse, belief in each other, and grip on actuality, all while not having to mess with any ballots.
Believing that Musk rigged this November’s consequence has grow to be, not less than for some, simpler than accepting the reality: Trump, an overtly racist and misogynistic candidate who tried to overthrow the federal government and has mentioned he desires generals like these of the Third Reich, simply received the Electoral School and is poised to say the favored vote in the US. But fantasies about election fraud are harmful this time round, not as a result of they’ll actively undermine or mount a bodily risk to democracy, however as a result of they blunt, and even willfully ignore, actuality. That is Trump’s occasion now, everybody is aware of it, pundits ought to know that everybody is aware of it, and the GOP nonetheless received again management of the Senate and can doubtless declare a slim majority within the Home of Representatives. As of Friday, Trump had improved his vote margin in additional than 9 out of each 10 counties with near-complete outcomes, together with many progressive strongholds. Fixating on fraud disregards the fabric components that introduced the nation and its residents to this alternative, and detracts from the daunting work that have to be performed to get well.
And Elon Musk, “hacking” apart, performed a considerable position in Trump’s reelection marketing campaign by spreading and normalizing a variety of hateful rhetoric and conspiracy theories. He has been the spearhead of a rising phase of the ultra-wealthy technocratic class that quickly coalesced round Trump this 12 months. The far-right rhetoric about voter fraud that Musk has amplified helped set off a wave of demise threats in opposition to election officers. He’s attempting to single-handedly exchange goal sources of knowledge and reporting along with his white-supremacist social community, degrading America’s data surroundings to the purpose that it has grow to be unclear how, precisely, to vary anybody’s thoughts about something.
It isn’t shocking that suspicion concerning the election has cropped up. Conspiracy theories ceaselessly emerge round election time, and so they have for many years. These Democrats usually are not being uniquely, and even particularly, whiny or hypocritical. Earlier than Trump decried a “steal” in 2020, Democrats blamed Russian trolls and Fb in 2016. (In that case, to be clear, U.S. intelligence officers did discover proof of Russian interference—however not proof that it was what decisively swung the end result in Trump’s favor.) 4 years prior, Trump referred to as Barack Obama’s victory a “complete sham,” and in 2008 John McCain’s marketing campaign was reportedly amassing stories of “Election Day irregularities” earlier than his overwhelming defeat. Each occasions, a ballot discovered that roughly half of Republicans thought the election was stolen. In 2004, some Democrats blamed shenanigans in Ohio for John Kerry’s exit-poll-defying loss, and in 2000 the wrongdoer was then–Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the state’s notorious “hanging chads.”
But Trump’s political foes must be striving to show that cognitive flexibility, grounded in actuality, is feasible. Anybody who believes in democracy, registered Democrat or not, ought to settle for the outcomes—and, as an alternative of retroactively fixating on polling and knowledge, focus all their power on the financial, social, political, and different facets of individuals’s lives that induced this consequence, and on make these folks’s lives higher.