Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Where will the American right turn now?

[Getty Images]

Here’s a trick question: who said the following, and when? ‘Serious questions have arisen about the accuracy and reliability of new electronic voting machines, including concerns that they can be susceptible to fraud and computer hacking.’ A box of Roses chocolates for anyone who guessed correctly. That was Dianne Feinstein, Democrat senator for California, speaking aeons back in 2006.

One decade later and another Democrat declared that she had lost the presidential election that year because Vladimir Putin had hacked the US voting system. A month after losing the 2016 race, a still-sore Hillary Clinton told party donors: ‘This is not just an attack on me and my campaign. This is an attack against our country. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation.’

It turns out that more than two people can play at that game. Before the 2016 election, Donald J. Trump unveiled his escape plan in the event that he lost. ‘The whole election is being rigged,’ he told a rally in North Carolina in October 2016. ‘The whole thing is one big fix. One big ugly lie.’ Happily for him, in 2016 he didn’t need to keep making that claim because he won, transforming the ‘rigged’ election into a great, ‘beautiful’ one. Still, to be sure, in 2020 he made the same claims of corruption as he had in 2016, but this time — having lost — cried that the ‘fix’ had worked. And so he continued to claim this, right up to — and after — the moment that part of a crowd of his supporters, whipped up by these lies, stormed the US Capitol to reverse the result of the election.

In the world’s most powerful democracy, the only votes you believe in are those you have won

It is a dangerous toy, this one that both sides have played with.

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