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The primary in Nevada is another reminder of the unusually high stakes in this years campaigns for election administration positions longtime political backwaters that have gotten little attention in the past. But followers of former President Donald Trump and his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him have poured into secretary of state races in 2022, especially in the battleground states that will play a key role in deciding the next presidential contest.

Election integrity proponents were relieved when Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who stood up against Trumps demands to find more votes, survived a reelection challenge last month from a Trump-backed challenger.

But secretary of state contests still to come demonstrate that the Trump movements drive to control election offices is far from over.

In Pennsylvania, where the governor appoints the secretary of state, Trump-backed Doug Mastriano won the GOP primary last month. Trump has endorsed secretary of state contenders in other battlegrounds, Arizona and Michigan, as well. And a number of candidates like Marchant are not endorsed by Trump but they have adopted and amplified Trumps false claims about the 2020 election.

If we get just a few of the candidates that we have in our coalition, we save our country, Marchant told Bannon on a podcast earlier this month. Marchant did not respond to an interview request.

Despite his alignment with Trump, who has not endorsed in the Nevada primary but commands broad support in the GOP, Marchant is hardly a lock for Republicans secretary of state nomination on Tuesday.

Public polling has been sparse in this race, but a survey from The Nevada Independent/OH Predictive Insights published on Friday had Marchant deadlocked with developer Jesse Haw at 21 percent each. A plurality of GOP voters, 36 percent, were unsure, with other candidates or none of these combining for another 22 percent.

Haw, who briefly served in the state Senate, has flooded the race with his own cash. As of March 31, the last campaign finance report due, he raised more than $660,000 including more than $450,000 of his own money. That well outpaced the $43,000 that Marchant reported bringing in during the same time period.

Between the two, its kind of a bit of a tossup, said Mike Noble, the chief of research at OH Predictive Insights, noting the high number of undecided voters.

Haw has spent nearly $460,000 on television ads in the contest, according to data from the ad tracking firm AdImpact. Haws ads promote voter ID and say he will make ballot harvesting the practice of a third party collecting and returning voters mail ballots a felony. The spending is nearly double what Marchant and the PAC arm of his coalition Conservatives for Election Integrity have put on the airwaves.

And Haw has also gotten a major assist from a mysterious group called Americans for Secure Elections. That organization has pumped more than $1.7 million into TV ads either boosting Haw or attacking Marchant since the beginning of May, according to AdImpact.

Little is known about Americans for Secure Elections money or motives. In federal disclosures, the group reported receiving $1.15 million from a trio of dark money groups in March, but there is no indication where the funds came from originally. People listed as contacts for the group on state and federal campaign finance documents did not answer requests for comment.

Americans for Secure Elections had previously spent money in Ohios primary to boost Secretary of State Frank LaRose who has defended the 2020 election as fair in the past and easily defeated a challenger who said the election was stolen. (LaRose, however, shifted how he talked about voter fraud outside of Ohio, as he got Trumps endorsement for reelection.)

Haw, who also did not respond to an interview request, said in an email to The Nevada Independent that he too believed that the 2020 election had a lot of shenanigans and potential fraud. Nevertheless, Marchant has sought to cast himself as the true MAGA option in the Republican primary. Looking pretty good in the primary, but I just need to keep working hard and keep up with my cabal Republican establishment opponent who is spending double what I am spending, Marchant told Bannon recently.

Marchant, Haw and others are competing to succeed Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, who was term-limited. Cegavske defended the security of the 2020 election in Nevada, earning a censure from the state Republican Party.

Democrats will nominate Cisco Aguilar, an attorney and former staffer for the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is unopposed in his primary.

Heading into Marchants primary election on Tuesday, his America First Secretary of State Coalition has had a mixed record in primaries. The coalitions biggest victory so far was in Pennsylvania, where Mastriano, a state senator, won the GOP gubernatorial nomination. If he wins the governorship, Mastriano would be able to appoint Pennsylvanias secretary of state.

Mastriano is among the most prominent election deniers in the country, and has highlighted the role his pick to run Pennsylvania elections could play in the future.

I get to appoint the secretary of state, whos delegated from me the power to make the corrections to elections, the voting logs and everything, Mastriano said on a local station in March, according to audio clipped by a Democratic opposition research group. I could decertify every machine in the state with the stroke of a pen.

Mastriano has also repeatedly said he has someone in mind for that role should he win in November, but he has not yet publicly named that person.

Mastrianos campaign did not return a request for comment.

Other successes for the group include Kristina Karamo, the Trump-endorsed secretary candidate in Michigan who effectively won the GOP nomination there in April, and Audrey Trujillo, who ran unopposed in last weeks New Mexico Republican secretary of state primary.

But the coalitions candidates have also lost in a handful of primaries so far including in Nebraska, Idaho and, most notably, Georgia, where Raffensperger defeated the Trump-backed Rep. Jody Hice in a primary.

Later this year, another prominent coalition member facing a GOP primary for secretary of state is Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem.

The Trump-endorsed Finchem is running for the open secretary of state office there, after whipping up support by pushing the much-maligned election review in Maricopa County and urging the decertification of the 2020 election, among other conspiracy theories. Finchem has been much more successful at fundraising than Marchant.

Another prominent candidate is Mesa County, Colo., Clerk Tina Peters, who is looking to challenge Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold. Peters has been indicted for her role in allegedly facilitating unauthorized access to election equipment, and she has been barred from overseeing this years elections in her county.

While the statewide chief election officer positions have drawn the most headlines, Marchant and his alliance have also turned their attention to county-level administrators as well races that garner even less attention than the under-the-radar secretary contests.

I have been recruiting clerks and registrars out here also, Marchant told Bannon on an April show. And Ive encouraged all of our candidates in our coalition to do the same thing.

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Trump backers unbowed in push to overtake state election offices - POLITICO

House Jan. 6 committee says there was no Trump election defense fund even though the campaign fundraised off of it

A screen displays statistics on former President Trump's fraud claims cases for the 2020 election during a hearing by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building on June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said it discovered that former President Donald Trump's election defense fund never existed.

"The select committee discovered no such fund existed," said Amanda Wick, a member of the committee's senior investigative counsel looking into the insurrection.

The new video evidence presented to the public during the hearing showed two former Trump campaign staffers disputing during testimony that the fund ever existed.

"I don't believe there is a fund called the Election Defense Fund," Hanna Allred, identified by the committee as a former Trump campaign staffer, said in a recorded statement. Gary Coby, a former Trump campaign digital director, told the committee that the defense fund was part of a marketing tactic.

The Trump campaign was regularly trying to raise money after the former president lost the Nov. 2020 election, encouraging donors to give to what fundraising pitches called the "official election defense fund." The committee discovered that the Trump campaign and its allies raised nearly $100 million in the first week after the election.

Brian Schwartz

Former Philadelphia city commissioner Al Schmidt, testifies during a hearing by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building on June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images

Former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt told the select committee that threats against him became "much more graphic" and began to include details about his family after then-President Donald Trump criticized him in a tweet.

Schmidt, a Republican official in charge of overseeing the 2020 election in Philadelphia, had pushed back on some of Trump's fraud claims in a "60 Minutes" interview days after the election.

Trump responded in a tweet: "A guy named Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia Commissioner and so-called Republican (RINO), is being used big time by the Fake News Media to explain how honest things were with respect to the Election in Philadelphia. He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty. We win!"

Schmidt said that he had already received threats as part of his job. But after Trump called him out by name, "the threats became much more specific, much more graphic and included not just me by name, but included members of my family by name, their ages, our address, pictures of our home, just every bit of detail that you can imagine," Schmidt told the select committee.

"That is what changed with that tweet," he said.

Kevin Breuninger

Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr is seen on video during his deposition for the public hearing of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 9, 2022.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

Former Attorney General William Barr repeatedly, and colorfully, dismissed the wide array of voter-fraud conspiracies being floated by Trump and some of his allies after his 2020 election loss, video from his interviews with the committee shows.

Barr ripped some of those conspiracy theories as "bulls---," "nonsense," "idiotic" and "crazy stuff," and said he told Trump to his face after the election that that the claims are "not panning out." He ran the Department of Justice from Feb. 14, 2019 to Dec. 23, 2020,

The panel played a clip of Barr recounting an Oval Office meeting a few weeks after the Nov. 3, 2020, election, in which he had to tell Trump that the DOJ "is not an extension of your legal team" and can't be used to "take sides in elections" by investigating fraud claims.

"We'll look at something if it's specific, credible, and could have affected the outcome of the election, and we're doing that and it's just not meritorious, they're not panning out," he said.

After seeing Trump spread those claims on Fox News, Barr on Dec. 1, 2020, told an Associated Press reporter that the DOJ has not seen fraud on scale that could affected outcome of election. When he next met with Trump, Barr said he thought he was going to be fired, telling the committee, "the president was as mad as I've ever seen him." The then-president accused him of making the statement "because you hate Trump."

Elsewhere, Barr recalled, "I told him that the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public was bulls---. I mean, that the claims of fraud were bulls---. And he was indignant about that."

"I reiterated that they'd wasted a whole month on these claims on these Dominion voting machines, and they were idiotic claims." Barr said he found those claims, that Dominion voting machines were rigged to flip votes to Joe Biden, were "disturbing" in that "I saw absolutely zero basis" for them.

"But they were made in such a sensational way that they were obviously influencing a lot of members of the public," even though they were "complete nonsense," Barr said.

"I told him that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that and it was doing a grave disservice to the country," Barr said.

Kevin Breuninger

Video from an interview with former President Trump campaign manager William Stepien (L), and his attorney Kevin Marino, is played during a hearing by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building on June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images

Former Trump campaign chief Bill Stepien told the committee that he and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., met with Trump to convince him that mail-in ballots weren't at a high risk of fraud as the former commander-in-chief discouraged voters from using them.

"We made our case for why we believed mail-in balloting, mail-in voting, not to be a bad thing for his campaign but, you know, the president's mind was made up," Stepien said in new testimony presented at the hearing.

The meeting with Trump took place in the summer of 2020 as the president publicly ripped the idea of mail-in ballots being used to vote during the coronavirus pandemic.

"Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they're cheaters," Trump said at a White House briefing that year.

Brian Schwartz

Former Trump campaign Lawyer Rudy Giuliani, is displayed on a screen during a hearing by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol on June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was "definitely intoxicated" on Election Night 2020 when he said at the White House that then-President Donald Trump should simply declare victory over Joe Biden, ex-Trump campaign aide Jason Miller said.

Miller said that he noticed Giuliani was inebriated when he and other officials, including former campaign manager Bill Stepien and then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, gathered at the White House to listen to what Giuliani wanted to tell Trump to say.

"The mayor was definitely intoxicated, but I did not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president, for example," Miller said as part of an interview with the select committee, clips of which were played in the hearing.

"There were suggestions by, I believe it was Mayor Giuliani, to go and declare victory and say that we'd won it outright," Miller said. He said he recalled saying at the time that Trump shouldn't declare victory until the numbers were more clear.

Giuliani was effectively saying, "'We won it, they're stealing it from us, where'd all the votes come from, we need to go say that we won,' and essentially anyone who didn't agree with that position was being weak," Miller told the investigators.

In a separate interview, Stepien told the committee it was "far too early" to make any such pronouncement.

Trump, in the early hours of Nov. 4, 2020, falsely claimed, "frankly, we did win this election."

Kevin Breuninger

U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) speaks during the second public hearing of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, at Capitol Hill, in Washington, U.S. June 13, 2022.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif, a member of the January 6th House Select Committee, says they plan to show how the Trump campaign ripped off their supporters by convincing them to contribute to their legal fight against the 2020 election results.

Lofgren says donors were deceived and much of those contributions weren't actually used in the eventual legal fight.

"We'll also show how that the Trump campaign used these false claims of election fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who were told their donations were for the legal fight in the courts," Lofgren said. "But the Trump campaign didn't use the money for that. The big lie was also a big ripoff."

Brian Schwartz

The select committee will explain how Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, but instead of conceding, he "decided to wage an attack on our democracy," Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said at the start of the hearing.

"The numbers don't lie," Thompson said of election outcomes. If those don't add up, you can go to court and "that's the end of the line," he said.

Trump "didn't have the numbers. He went to court. He still didn't have the numbers. He lost," Thompson said.

In Tuesday's hearing, "we'll tell the story of how Donald Trump lost an election" and "knew he lost," but decided to wage an attack on our democracy," the chairman said.

Kevin Breuninger

Video from an interview with former President Trump campaign manager William Stepien (L), and his attorney Kevin Marino, is played during a hearing by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building on June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images

Former Trump 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien's wife went into labor Monday morning, keeping him from testifying under subpoena before the Jan. 6 select committee in its second public hearing, NBC News reported, citing a source familiar with the matter.

The panel announced the scheduling shake-up less than an hour before the hearing was initially slated to begin. The news delayed the scheduled 10 a.m. ET start of the hearing by 30 to 45 minutes.

The panel intends instead to play video of Stepien's taped deposition, sources told NBC.

Kevin Breuninger

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Trump's former Attorney General Barr repeatedly dismisses claims of voter fraud as 'nonsense' to House investigators - CNBC

The House Democrats prime-time partisan program last week and the continuing hearings on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have two aims. One is to get midterm voters to think about something other than wallet-busting inflation, surging violent crime, the baby-formula shortage and the wide open southern border.

No sooner had Thursdays show ended than that goal grew even more elusive. Fridays historic inflation numbers mean voters pain at the pump and supermarket will continue, and led to another big drop on Wall Street as pessimism over the economy deepens.

The other aim of the hearings is to put a target on Donald Trumps back. He is Speaker Nancy Pelosis white whale and she would like nothing more than to lock him up to humiliate him and make sure he doesnt run again in 2024.

Coming more than 500 days after the appalling attack on the Capitol, the bid to paint Trump as the mastermind of an attempted coup fell far short of convincing despite the fact that Pelosi devised a one-sided presentation. And with this being the only prime-time hearing scheduled before the committees September report, it is unlikely she would hold back any bombshell evidence of Trumps guilt.

Certainly Trump doesnt think hes in danger.

I cant imagine I would be prosecuted, he told me Friday. I did absolutely nothing wrong. We have free speech.

He may not have committed a crime, but there is plenty wrong with what Trump said and did. The long list begins with his too-hot speech that January morning, his public and private demands that then-Vice President Mike Pence overturn the election and his delay in telling his rampaging supporters to leave the Capitol.

Still, charging him criminally based on what we know would be a giant leap even for Attorney General Merrick Garlands politicized Justice Department.

Trump also expressed the same disdain for Pelosi she has for him.

These are the same people who created the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, the Mueller investigation and the Ukraine hoax, he said. Its a disgrace and they cant run the country. Look at it. Its going to hell.

I had contacted the former president by phone after I learned Trump told an associate he was definitely running in 2024. Similar reports have surfaced in the past, and this one met the same fate: He wouldnt confirm or deny he made the comment.

Well, something has to be done but I havent announced anything, he said. But in my mind, Ive made a decision.

Its a near-lock he is running but he sees no advantage in saying so now. It would mean complying with federal rules on reporting fund-raising and expenditures and would stretch the campaign to an unbearable length.

It could also change the midterm dynamics. As it stands, a red wave is forming and there is little upside credit available to Trump. On the other hand, if he announces early and the wave fizzles, he would be blamed.

The last time I interviewed Trump was on Presidents Day at Mar-a-Lago. My main focus was on his continued claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which I see as a dead end.

Its backward looking and is likely to turn off moderate Republicans and independents who might otherwise be attracted to Trumps policies, which were certainly superior to Bidens.

I had asked then if he regarded agreement with him on the stolen election as a litmus test for supporters, including candidates he endorses. He insisted the answer was no and claimed he talks about the last election mostly because its the most important thing for some supporters.

I reminded him of that exchange and this time he didnt cite his supporters as an excuse for why he talks about it so often, saying a lot of things have come out since then that are as hot as a pistol. He was referring to some state audits and presumably the movie by Dinesh DSouza called 2000 Mules, both of which try to prove his claims but have not made serious inroads among unpersuaded voters.

Using the stolen theme also serves as a smokescreen for Trump to escape any second-guessing about his term or the way he campaigned for reelection. By his way of thinking, if he actually won the 2020 election, why should he admit any errors?

Another reason why the backward focus is misguided is that, even if Trump wins in 2024, there is nothing he can do about the past. Joe Bidens victory cant be undone, so whats the point beyond a rallying cry?

Friday, for the first time, he tied his stolen claim to forward-looking congressional action, albeit an impractical one. As he puts it, What you need to have for secure elections is all paper ballots, same-day voting only, an identification requirement and absentee voting only for military stationed out of the country and for people who are truly sick and cant get to the polls.

He believes mail-in ballots are ripe for fraud and would ban them other than for a limited absentee program.

The chances of such legislation passing Congress are zero, and I told him he sounded like he wanted to federalize election rules and override state control, which was a main objection the GOP raised against Bidens national election bill.

Called the John Lewis Voting Rights Act after the late Georgia congressman and civil rights leader, the measure would have made permanent many of the lax ballot-security changes states and leftist activists made in 2020 because of the pandemic. Thankfully, even with Biden making shameful racial accusations, the Lewis bill stalled in the Senate.

Trumps response to that history was to say that Republicans should do something about voting laws, and added that you need to have secure, honest elections and strong borders or you dont have a country.

Thats certainly true, but its also true that Trump gives the impression hes stuck in the past and needs a fresh message. Although he is clearly still a huge power within the GOP, his old feuds and grievances already sound stale and by 2024, they are not likely to inspire the hope and confidence America desperately needs.

Reader Joe Alloy points out the two faces of Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Dem. He writes: Murphy is leading the talks on gun control but in the midst of the George Floyd riots of 2020, he and Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation that would have removed approximately 10,000 armed police from schools.

Headline: Dems say no to Biden in 24.

Finally, a united nation!

Tom Schultz wants equal time, but isnt holding his breath. He writes: I cant wait for the Hunter Biden hearings to be nationally televised by all major outlets and directed by a Hollywood- type.

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Donald Trump needs a new tune -- it's time to move on from old grievances - New York Post

A wag once said the best thing about living at the Jersey Shore is that youre so close to New York City you feel like you never need to go there.

I agree. We get our fill of the New York experience from the New Yorkers who come here.

Donald Trump for example.

Long before he went to Washington, The Donald went to Atlantic City.

There, he ripped off and shortchanged virtually everyone he did business with.

Back when Trump first flirted with a White House run in 2011, I interviewed some of the locals. They knew what to expect when The Donald moved his hustle from A.C. to D.C.

Everybody down here is rooting for him, one said. They figure hell screw the Chinese the way he screwed us. Hell probably screw some Arabs, too.

That was Seth Grossman, a lawyer who heads a conservative group called Liberty and prosperity.

Grossman liked most of what Trump did while in office. But as a strict constructionist of the Constitution, he opposed the stunt Trump tried to pull on Jan. 6 .

Any American who calls him or herself a conservative must understand and respect our Constitution, Grossman said in a post at the time. Vice-President Pence did what the Twelfth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution required him to do.

What it required him to do was count the votes, not certify them. The certification was done by the states a month earlier.

Trump couldnt change that. All he could do is give the Democrats a talking point theyll be milking for decades to come.

I keep saying Trump walked into every trap the Democrats set for him, Grossman said when I called him last week. People say he exposed those traps. Well if a soldier steps on every land mine the enemy puts out for him, hes exposing the land mines.

Which is what Trump did. Till The Donalds Jan. 6 debacle, it was the opposition that was responsible for those riots in places like Portland.

But when it comes to rioting, nothing tops the video of that mob carrying Trump banners as they knocked that policewoman unconscious while storming the Capitol. That Hang Mike Pence chant will be hard to top as well.

And theres plenty more where that came from. The Democrats will be releasing it piece by piece over the coming weeks.

They certainly dont have much else to talk about as we go into the November elections. Inflation? Gas prices? Immigration?

Trump gave them the gift that keeps on giving.

But he screwed his own followers. Trump couldnt have picked a worse jurisdiction to have his crowd go crazy, Grossman says.

The last thing youd want to do is go to Manhattan or D.C., he said. He takes his most loyal supporters and puts them at the mercy of his worst enemies in law enforcement.

Trump hasnt made a lot of friends in Georgia either. But he might need some if the Fulton County prosecutor decides to indict him.

Thats a real possibility according to lawyer Norm Eisen of the Brookings Institution.

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Eisen co-authored a 100-page study of a possible prosecution of Trump and his demand that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger find 11,780 votes, which would have made The Donald the winner by one vote.

We conclude that Trumps post-election conduct in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes, the study stated. These charges potentially include criminal solicitation to commit election fraud; intentional interference with performance of election duties; conspiracy to commit election fraud; criminal solicitation; and state RICO violations.

In a tweet on Friday, Eisen said, Lots saying last nights hearing ultimately had an audience of 1: AG Garland. NO! It was an audience of 2. Fulton Cty. DA Fani Willis was also watching, she will likely be the first to prosecute Trump, & Liz Cheney knew it.

Ironically, the only thing that could save Trump from a state indictment might be a federal indictment by Attorney General Merrick Garland. After that hearing, theres plenty of material if Garland decides to get frisky.

A lot of Republicans would profess to be appalled if that were to happen.

But if Trump were hauled off to the hoosegow, that would clear the way for some other Republican to run for president in 2024.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the favorite of most Republicans I know.

Unlike Trump, hes young and has a clean resume. (Not like The Donald) Also unlike Trump, hes won every race hes ever run in.

Best of all, hes not from New York City.

One president from there will be quite sufficient.

ADD - EVEN HIS HOMETOWN NEWSPAPER HAS TURNED ON TRUMP

In an editorial, the New York Post says what Ive been saying for months: Donald Trump is doing more for Democrats than Republicans. Heres an excerpt::

Trump has become a prisoner of his own ego. He cant admit his tweeting and narcissism turned off millions. He wont stop insisting that 2020 was stolen even though hes offered no proof that its true.

Respected officials like former Attorney General Bill Barr call his rants nonsense. This isnt just about Liz Cheney. Mitch McConnell, Betsy DeVos, Mark Meadows they all knew Trump was delusional. His own daughter and son-in-law testified it was bull.

Trumps response? He insults Barr, and dismisses Ivanka as checked out. He clings to more fantastical theories, such as Dinesh DSouzas debunked 2,000 Mules, even as recounts in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin confirm Trump lost.

More: Recent Paul Mulshine columns

Paul Mulshine may be reached at pmulshine@starledger.com.

Follow him on Twitter @Mulshine. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook and on Twitter.

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Donald Trumps New York City hustle is finally catching up with him | Mulshine - NJ.com

Donald Trump's recent endorsement struggles (most notably in Georgia) in the weeks leading up to House Jan. 6 hearings have led to renewed speculation that the former president is losing his grip on the Republican Party. In fact, recent reporting suggests that several prominent Republicans are likely to run for president in 2024, whether or not Trump himself launches a third campaign. But let's put that in the proper context: Trump's oft-repeated Big Lie about the stolen 2020 election has been called the new "Lost Cause" (in literallyhundreds of articles) but it's only one facet of a broader mindset that has moved to the center of GOP politics and none of that is going away, regardless of what happens to Trump as a person or a political figure.

That mindset is rooted in Trump's claim that the system is specifically and maliciously rigged against his base meaning white Christian conservatives, especially men, who are wholesome, innocent victims of malevolent outside forces, sinister elites and dangerous minorities. This echoes the Lost Cause reframing of the Civil War to cast white Southerners as the noble and innocent victims of similar malevolent forces. Freedom, not slavery, was the cause the South fought for, according to the Lost Cause story goes "freedom" defined as "states' rights," but only for certain states and on certain issues, of course. Their soldiers, led by General Robert E. Lee, were depicted as the greatest and most noble warriors of history. That's the heart of the big lie that Trump's big lie echoes, as attested by the Confederate flags carriedinto the Capitol during Trump's failed coup attempt, and echoed in his repeated defense of Confederate monuments that wildly misrepresent history.

The "great replacement" theory echoes the same basic claim of victimhood, as do a number of other Trump-era big lies: the "fake news" deflection of all damaging revelations, the QAnon conspiracy theory, the "critical race theory" panic and the related anti-"woke" crusade. (It also underlies Fox News' decision not to air the Jan. 6 hearings a point I'll return to below.) With all these victimhood narratives in place, it's ludicrous to expect the return of a "strong, responsible" GOP that Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and the never-Trump Republicans yearn for.

RELATED:To indict Donald Trump, prosecutors will need to prove intent. Well, here it is

Two days after the Jan. 6 insurrection, historian Karen L. Cox drew striking parallels, in a New York Times op-ed,between Trump's wholesale mendacity and the "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy, whose central hero was Robert E. Lee. "Mr. Trump's lost cause mirrors that of Lee's," she wrote. "His dedicated followers do not see him as having failed them, but as a man who was failed by others. Mr. Trump best represents their values even those of white supremacy and the cause he represents is their cause, too."

But in both cases, the myths were bigger than the men, Cox continued:

The Lost Cause did not belong to Lee; Lee belonged to the Lost Cause a cultural phenomenon whose momentum could not be stopped.

Even if Mr. Trump were to remove himself from public life in the coming years, his lost cause and the myths he's helped create about elections, voter fraud and fake news will likely continue, a cultural and political phenomenon that shows no sign of ending.

Cox is hardly alone in making this point. Five years earlier political scientist Angie Maxwell, co-author of "The Long Southern Strategy" (Salon interview here),identified Trump's candidacy with the Lost Cause."Southern white support for Trump is not just about losing the Civil War. It's about losing, period," she wrote. Nor was it limited to the South, even if that was where he ran strongest. "Trump's Southern strategy turns out to be less about geography and more about identity. And many want to go back to an America in which people like them run the show," Maxwell wrote. While race was clearly a fundamental ingredient, the defensive logic goes much farther:

Southern whiteness expands beyond racial identity and supremacy, encapsulating rigid stances on religion, education, the role of government, the view of art, an opposition to science and expertise and immigrants and feminism, and any other topic that comes under attack. This ideological web of inseparable strands envelops a community and covers everything, and it is easily (and intentionally by Donald Trump) snagged.

All this was in place before Trump ran in 2016, but it wasn't center stage in American conservative politics. Now it is. And even if Trump leaves the stage, the play will go on. Evidence to that effect is overwhelming. As noted above, the same basic victimhood mindset underlies the Fox News decision not to air the Jan. 6 hearings, catering to the whole spectrum of reality-denying narratives about Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election. "There is a kind of perverse public service standard there. Fox is protecting its public from the news," NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen tweeted. "It has made the call that the committed audience won't stand for having the hearings 'shoved down our throats.'" This may not qualify as new information, but Fox News is in the identity-protection business, not the "news" business. That quasi-cult identity has been reshaped by Trump over the past seven years, even as he previously reshaped himself as someone capable of doing that.

Republicans like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger successfully defied Trump's efforts to steal the 2020 election, and then defeated Trump-endorsed candidates. But it's important to understand that they're committed to project of potentially stealing future elections, by repeating, amplifying and acting on a subset of election lies that they're personally most comfortable with which of course could always shift again in the future.

That's precisely what happened with the original Lost Cause, as historian Adam Domby explores in "The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory," which focuses on the unique political culture and history of North Carolina. "The construction of a coherent Lost Cause narrative was not always a deliberate process," Domby writes. "At times, it was an organic one built on minor exaggerations and fabrications woven into daily life. Some stories were created to serve a specific purpose for an individual, often for monetary gain; others, to garner social capital; and others still to aid in political mobilization." A similar narrative mishmash was used by many so-called conservatives, first to justify supporting Trump in 2016, then to explain away his 2020 election loss, and now to justify or explain away the Jan. 6 insurrection. In every case, a supposedly conservative, no-nonsense, traditionally-minded population engaged in fanciful, inventive storytelling in order to create a new comfort zone and then inhabit it.

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As noted above, the core of the Lost Cause lay in denial about the central cause of the Civil War and in portraying the Confederacy as engaged in an heroic struggle for freedom, not slavery: "freedom" defined as states' rights to self-determination, thus turning the North into a tyrannical bogeyman. "This allowed Confederates to be recalled not as traitors but as noble patriots fighting to defend a set of principles that survived the war despite defeat on the battlefield," Domby notes. "In addition to a new gallant cause, this narrative required a legacy of valiant military deeds. The Lost Cause presented Confederate soldiers as the greatest in human history, warriors who only lost the war due to the overwhelming resources of the North."

These key elements shaped others, such asthe disappearance from historical accounts of any white Southern opposition to slavery or secession and the historical fabrication of "Black Confederates," along with the disappearance of mass Black resistance.

"Confederate mythmakers excised the memory of southern dissenters, Unionists, deserters, draft dodgers, and even ambivalent southerners from their retelling of the war," Domby writes. "Neither black nor white North Carolinians of the Civil War generation believed there had been black Confederate troops during the conflict," but the long-belated creation of "Class B" pensions for formerly enslaved people "reinforced white supremacy by perpetuating a myth of widespread loyal slaves," even though the arguments made for such pensions around the turn of the century "made clear that the loyalty being rewarded was to white slave owners rather than the Confederate state." Only in the last two decades has the existence of these pensions been trotted out to argue that enslaved people fought for the Confederacy in any meaningful sense.

Domby's book is strongest in illuminating how these different strands weave together, serving different subjects and their shifting needs over time. For simplicity's sake, military historian Edward Bonekemper's"The Myth of the Lost Cause" effectively demolishes the core of that false narrative. He identifies seven main tenets that fall into two main categories: The first two are devoted to denying the central role of slavery in the conflict, and the rest to casting the war in chivalric terms, with Lee as doomed hero. Although he devotes separate chapters to refuting each tenet, two brief passages effectively refute the first four tenets in just a few sentences.

The first two tenets are these:

Slavery was a benevolent institution for all involved but was dying by 1861. There was therefore no need to abolish slavery suddenly, especially by war.

States' rights, not slavery, was the cause of secession and the establishment of the Confederacy and thus of the Civil War.

In response, Bonekemper cites one simple fact: When the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act was strengthened in 1850, "the fear of being kidnapped and sold into slavery led some fifteen to twenty thousand free Northern blacks to migrate to Canada between 1850 and 1860." This terror-driven mass migration is clearly incompatible with the invented notion that slavery was on the way out, or that the South was genuinely committed to the principle of states' rights.

The next two tenets central to the chivalric account are also quickly demolished.:

The Confederacy had no chance of winning, but did the best it could with its limited resources.

Indeed, it almost won, led by Robert E. Lee, one of the greatest generals in history.

Bonekemper points out, however, that in military terms,"All the Confederacy needed was a stalemate, which would confirm its existence as a separate country. The burden was on the North to defeat the Confederacy and compel the return of the eleven wayward states to the Union."

If Lee had really been "one of the greatest generals in history," surely he would have understood this. Instead, he pushed for dramatic victories, leading to catastrophic defeat. Bonekemper has written an entire book on that topic, "How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War," but this observation alone suffices to pierce the great man's myth. A military commander's first responsibility is grand strategy (as we have seen more recently in Ukraine), and getting that wrong is to inflict carnage and defeat on your own troops.

Of course historians have much more to say about these questions, but the point here is that the Confederate Lost Cause myth can be refuted with a few straightforward facts and the same is true of Donald Trump's 2020 Lost Cause.The 63 court cases Trump and his allies lost offered absolutely no hard evidence for his stolen-election claims, and we just heard former Attorney General Bill Barr, no friend to the Democrats, calling many of those claims "complete nonsense," "crazy stuff" or simply "bullshit." We also now know thatTrump's internal campaign operatives, who had remained loyal through and after Election Day, told him clearly he had lost, and that his own daughter took Barr's word for it.

But here's the thing about myths: They generally can't be punctured by evidence. What matters for myths is their power to make meaning, as Karen Armstrong argues in the introduction to "The Battle for God." Secondly and even more important, the consequences of Trump's election lies continue to unfold: There's a vigorous multi-pronged effort to enable Republicans to win the White House in 2024, regardless of what voters want and regardless of whether Trump himself is the candidate. In other words, Trump's Lost Cause myth is still thriving, even if it will never give him what he wants most: erasing the stigma of being a loser.

Kemp and Raffensperger's success in winning re-election despite Trump is evidence, in fact, that Trumpism can continue even without its namesake. Much the same can be said about the other Trump-era big lies I referenced above. The QAnon cult began, for example, to deflect attention from Robert Mueller's investigation deflection, although it had deep roots in Americanconspiracy cultureand historical antisemitism.Ambiguity was part of its DNA, morphing in all manner of ways, so the end of the Mueller investigation without any payoff made little difference to its spread, and belief in QAnon has reportedlyincreased since Trump left office, even though he can no longer order the mass arrests of alleged pedophile liberals.

Similarly, the hollowness of the "critical race theory" panic, as captured in Don Moynihan's "Bullshit, Branding and CRT," is its not-so-secret source of strength. If Trumpism is our real problem, more than Donald Trump as a figurehead or actual candidate, then opponents of Trumpism need an appropriate counter-myth. Trump triumphed over the rest of the Republican field in 2016 because conventional conservatism had utterly failed to deliver on its promises.

Conservatives have excelled at winning elections and gaining political power, as shown in Edmund Fawcett's historical overview, "Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition" (author interview here.)But exercising political power hasn't gone nearly as well because conservative solutions based on ideologies of "small government" and the "free market" simply don't work. Rather than running away from "big government" as Democrats have habitually done, at least since the Clinton years, liberals and progressives need to think constructively about how to make government serve people better not just as a matter of policy, but as a way of shared meaning-making, because that's literally what it is.

This is most visible in public schools, public libraries, public parks and other such areas of the commons, as explored in the recent book "The Privatization of Everything" (author interview here), yet we consistently fail to recognize or celebrate that, let alone be guided by it in more difficult realms, such as responding to crime or inflation, to cite two highly relevant examples.

The essence of democracy is the promise that the people, acting together, can shape a better world. When democracy fails to deliver, openings are created for autocrats, who will promising impossible, quasi-utopian solutions in order to gain power. Once they have power, as we have recently discovered, they never give it up willingly. By allowing anti-government conservatives to hold power for far too long, along with their Democratic appeasers, we have left ourselves vulnerable to authoritarian takeover. Even if Donald Trump is beginning to fade from the scene, that danger is very much still with us.

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Trumpism without Trump: Maybe he's beginning to fade but the danger to democracy isn't - Salon