Trying to Understand Trump Advocates
Several weeks ago I decided I need a better understanding of what motivates seemingly normal Americans to continue their loyalty to Donald Trump in spite of his irrational and frequently reckless actions. Not included in this group are QAnon supporters, Oath Keepers and Proud Boys whose motivations seem beyond the pale. My interest is in examining how individuals with legitimate education credentials, holding responsible jobs and apparently of sound mind have come to the defense of the former president.
As part of my effort to accomplish this objective, I identified several pro-Trump books by authors with credible backgrounds and finally chose “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” by Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor of the online magazine The Federalist, a right-wing publication. Hemingway also co-wrote with Carrie Campbell, “Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court.”
Hemingway is listed as a contributor on the website of the Federalist Society, an organization founded in 1982 by a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers as an alternative to the American Bar Association. The Federalist Society has been very successful in recent years with regards to US Supreme Court appointments---no surprise as to the six SCOUS justices who are members of the Federalist Society. There is, however, no formal relationship between the Federalist Society and The Federalist magazine that Hemingway edits.
A Denver native, Hemingway earned an economics degree from the University of Colorado at Denver. In addition to her editorial job, she is a frequent contributor to Fox News, and is Senior Journalism Fellow at the Washington, DC, campus of Hillsdale College, an accredited institution located in Michigan. The college does not accept any federal or state government funds, but it does solicit tax-deductible contribution.
Hemingway has the credentials and writing skills to produce a plausible analysis of a presidential election. A quick perusal of her work about the 2020 presidential election reveals a massive accumulation of endnotes, 86 pages worth, one for every four pages of exposition. But “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” is not a well-documented examination of how the presidential election of 2020 played out. It is an in-your-face defense of Donald Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him.
From the outset, Hemingway seeks to discredit anything and everything done by the media, big tech and the Democrats in the 2020 election. As she portrays them, it was a joint effort that “changed election laws and procedures, reduced or eliminated the oversight of ballots, manipulated the COVID-19 response, stoked violent racial unrest, published fake news, censored accurate news and did everything in their power to make sure what had happened in 2016… could not happen again in 2020.” Such a conspiracy would be remarkable indeed.
Hemingway’s strategy apparently was to overwhelm the reader with a massive collection of endnotes, more than 1200 on those 86 pages. This leaves the impression of a superhuman research effort leaving no stone unturned. But the effort seems a bit diminished when the reader sees that almost 40 endnotes are based on earlier publications by Hemingway’s or her husband Mark Hemingway, also an editor at The Federalist, and nearly 100 of the endnotes are from Twitter accounts. With its 280 characters limitation, Twitter may be a useful tool for organizing protests, but it’s not likely a substantive research aid.
But there are also problems with the relationship between content in the body of “Rigged” and the citations referenced. For example, earlier on Hemingway seeks to justify Trumps refusal to accept the result of the 2020 presidential election by claiming Democrats “should have been indicted for their behavior following the 2016 election.” She then supports her argument by referencing several of the more extreme Democratic responses to Trump’s victory in light of Russian activities during the election, and claiming that Mueller Report, issued in June 2019, found no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to “steal” the election from Clinton.
The truth is more complicated. Mueller found that Russia interfered with the election, but “did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple efforts from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.” The investigation, however, did lead to the indictment on a variety of counts for more than thirty individuals, including five Trump associates, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, General Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. It did not, however, exonerate Trump from obstruction of justice charges related to his efforts to impede the Mueller inquiry.
In a chapter entitled “Zuckerberg Should Be in Jail,” Hemingway asserts that “Big Tech” is biased against conservatives and likely used search engine manipulation against Trump. The citation to support this claim quotes testimony before the US Senate Judiciary Committee by Robert Epstein, a Harvard Ph.D., speculating that in 2016 “Google alone may have swayed 2.6 million Americans to vote for Hillary Clinton.” Epstein based his estimate of Google’s impact on his “previous experiment” with search engine manipulation. But his previous experiment was conducted in the 2015 United Kingdom election between David Cameron, the Conservative incumbent and Ed Miliband, Cameron’s Labor opponent, a very different environment and set of circumstances---British v. American, presidential v. parliamentary, incumbent v. non-incumbent and two men competing v. man and woman competing.
Hemingway followed up the 2016 projection with Epstein’s claim that he had “monitored Google results in 2020 with the assistance of 700 volunteers in three swing states and concluded, ‘Google search results were strongly biased in favor of liberals and Democrats’....these manipulations…could easily have shifted at least six million votes in just one direction.” The validity of Epstein’s claim is called into question by the fact that the three states his team monitored were Arizona, Florida and North Carolina. The last two Trump carried in 2020.
In her description of the Georgia general election in 2020, Hemingway offers information from a variety of sources. She also refers in a couple of instances to Gabriel Sterling, the chief of state for the Georgia Secretary of State, but she does not mention nor quote Sterling’s comments in his press conference on December 1, 2020. The Georgia elections official blasted Trump for not speaking out against the death threats and other harassments being directed at elections workers and even voting system contractors. “Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed.”
Sterling, a Republican, recognized Trump’s right to go to court to contest the election, but he said, “You need to…stop inspiring people to commit potential act of violence.”
Hemingway’s approach in this book reflects the basic principles of Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. An American psychologist, Festinger developed his ideas attempting to explain group behavior. He understood that people generally gravitate to groups where there is a tendency to share like opinions and a resistance to accepting any new information or ideas that might challenge the shared opinions. Hemingway’s quick rejection of any facts that call into question Trump’s worldview is consistent with Festinger’s theory
“Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” is not a book that I could recommend for either content or accuracy, but I’m glad I’ve read it. Nothing should be done to prevent books like this from being published. Authors like Hemingway should not be censored. That is not what American democracy is about.
When something is published or otherwise broadly shared and we recognize it is not accurate and is potential hurtful to the public, we should try to offer counter views. That is likely to be a slow and sometimes painful process, but it is in the long run the way to preserve the benefits of democracy.
And generally, it will work---after all, Mollie Hemingway wrote in a December 10, 2015, article in The Federalist about Donald Trump: “…he’s a demagogue with no real solutions for anything at all. He’s a narcissist who takes no responsibility for the negative consequences of his ill-conceived and incoherent verbal spews. He flip-flops incessantly. He is not honest when called to account for previous things he’s said.”
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/are-fair-elections-possible/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/17/rigged-review-mollie-hemingway-donald-trump
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2019/03/mueller-concludes-investigation/
https://thefederalist.com/2015/12/10/when-it-comes-to-donald-trump-i-hate-everyone/