Trump Baselessly Claimed The Virginia Election Was ‘RIGGED,’ And We Have Got To Stop Normalizing His Propaganda

On Tuesday, Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment that could give Democrats four new House seats in the state. It was a narrow victory for democratic voters and congressional Democrats, as the referendum passed with 51% of the vote, leading to immediate court challenges, which resulted in a circuit court judge ruling in favor of the Republicans, who challenged the idea that the redistricting effort was ever legal from the start. Considering how close the vote was, it’s not surprising that Republicans challenged it, just as it’s not surprising that Democrats have appealed the circuit judge’s decision, sending the case to the state supreme court.

You know what else isn’t surprising, but should be? The president of the United States, citing no evidence whatsoever, immediately took to social media to claim the Virginia election was “RIGGED.”

“A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!,” President Donald Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Wednesday. “All day long Republicans were winning, the Spirit was unbelievable, until the very end when, of course, there was a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop!’\’ Where have I heard that before — And the Democrats eked out another Crooked Victory! Six to five goes to ten to one, and yet the Presidential Election in November was very close to a 50-50 split. In addition to everything else, the language on the Referendum was purposefully unintelligible and deceptive. As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum, and neither do they! Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”

First of all — Mr. president, sir, an “extraordinarily brilliant person” would have a much firmer grasp on when words need to be capitalized and the actual function of quotation marks.

But there’s a larger issue than Trump’s penchant for being comically delusional at play here. Under Trump, blatant lies and round-the-clock propaganda have become so normalized that we barely even wince when the commander in chief is obviously just making shit up on a whim. And we’re not even talking about plausible propaganda. We’re talking about easily-debunked falsehoods that wouldn’t withstand even the most minimal scrutiny under a political landscape where simple facts still mattered.

Trump is literally resurrecting old lies that did nothing but cause a riot at the U.S. Capitol the first time around. He’s still lying about mail-in ballots being used to cheat, an idea he has repeated over and over again for years, but has never substantiated with even a modicum of evidence. He appears to still be under the impression that Republicans leading the vote count at firs, but then trailing Democrats as more votes get counted, is evidence of malfeasance, when, actually, it’s just evidence of math continuing to math. (Not that our “extraordinarily brilliant” president has any real understanding of how math works. Just ask RFK Jr.)

To this day, Trump and his spineless underlings are still perpetuating the president’s “big lie” regarding the 2020 election being rigged against him. And Trump is now reflexively transferring that provably false narrative to any election that doesn’t go his way.

And, again, this kind of propaganda has become normal. Those of us who recognize Trump for the compulsive liar and grifter that he is are too overwhelmed by the sheer volume of his lies — which come at us on at least an hourly basis every single day — that we couldn’t possibly keep up with it all, let alone challenge more than a fraction of it. And his cultists either don’t care that he’s consistently lying to their faces, or they’re just too devoid of the capacity for critical, independent thought even to know they’re perpetually being duped.

The saddest part is that making blatant propaganda commonplace like this will likely have a lasting effect that will remain long after the orange menace is out of office.

Sad — terrifying, actually.

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