Republicans believe the darndest things

Aaron Blake compiles a rather extraordinary catalogue of falsehoods that have taken root among the GOP base.

• A new CBS News/YouGov poll gets at a question I’ve been hoping someone would ask for a while. It gauged just how many Americans buy into the still-baseless idea that Biden had something to do with the successful charges against Trump in Manhattan. Turns out, it’s 43 percent — and 80 percent of Republicans.
• Just as a mere 20 percent of Republicans reject the Manhattan conspiracy theory, previous YouGov polling has shown only about 1 in 5 Republicans even acknowledge that Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. (He most certainly did.)
• A majority of Republicans have labeled the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection “mostly an Antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters.” (This is false.)
• Half of Republicans have denied Trump even had classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. And about half have said they were at least “probably” planted. (Trump has acknowledged having the documents; there is no evidence they were planted.)
• About 4 in 10 Americans and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans have said Biden didn’t legitimately win enough votes in 2020, even though Trump’s theories about this repeatedly fall apart under even modest scrutiny. (Trump backers have at least come to largely acknowledge there is no hard evidence for their belief.) 

Belief in Trump is overriding all evidence and common sense among an astonishing number of our fellow citizens.

Over a year ago, elections commentator Ronald Brownstein explained why this works for Trump. He has convinced

... most Republican voters to view his four criminal indictments as a politicized “witch hunt” aimed not only at him, but them....  the inclination of so many Republican voters to dismiss all of the charges accumulating against Trump ... reflects something much more fundamental: the hardening tendency of conservatives to believe that they are the real victims of bias in a society irreversibly growing more racially and culturally diverse.

The good news is that about 57 percent of us don't believe any of these fables. We are the majority.

If we don't want to live in a terrifying cloud-cockooland, we have to get that majority out to defend reality in November.