When it comes to his lies about the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump is fond of the phrase “everyone knows.” He won the race he lost “in a landslide,” the Republican has said, and “everyone knows” it. When pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” additional votes, the outgoing president also claimed that “everyone knows” he won the state, despite the actual results.
In reality, of course, the number of people who know the truth about Trump’s defeat is far short of “everyone.” As The Washington Post reported, even his White House chief of staff didn’t take the claims seriously and joked about the baseless claims.
In a text message that has been scrutinized by federal prosecutors, Meadows wrote to a White House lawyer that his son, Atlanta-area attorney Blake Meadows, had been probing possible fraud and had found only a handful of possible votes cast in dead voters’ names, far short of what Trump was alleging. The lawyer teasingly responded that perhaps Meadows’s son could locate the thousands of votes Trump would need to win the election. The text was described by multiple people familiar with the exchange.
The Post’s report, which adds new context but refers to information that appeared in the House Jan. 6 committee’s final report, went on to note that the then-White House chief of staff and his son had a “jocular” exchange, effectively treating Trump’s claims as a punch line.
They’re “one of many exchanges from the time in which Trump aides and other Republican officials expressed deep skepticism or even openly mocked the election claims being made publicly by Trump,” the article added.
It’s a point I keep coming back to because it’s emblematic of an important larger truth. Across much of the political world, it’s common knowledge that election officials, lawyers, judges, journalists, scholars and Democrats all concluded that the former president’s claims were ridiculous.
But what’s less appreciated is the number of people close to Trump — his own allies — who came to the same conclusion.
As regular readers know, his campaign manager didn’t believe the Big Lie. Neither did his campaign’s lawyers and data experts. His Justice Department appointees told him he lost fair and square, as did his Department of Homeland Security appointees. The outside private researchers who were hired to prove that he didn’t actually lose also told him he lost.
It’s against this backdrop that Trump’s final White House chief of staff — by any fair measure, a very conservative Republican — treated his boss’ claims as a literal joke. This is not to say that Meadows was a card-carrying member of the Reality-Based Community. He wasn’t. As regular readers no doubt remember, it was Meadows who was with Trump in the Oval Office during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He was also involved in the fake electors scheme. Meadows was also in frequent communication with far-right GOP members of Congress about efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It was also Meadows who allegedly — and quite literally — set fire to documents in a White House fireplace, several times, after having important post-election meetings. But in his private communications, it seems he was tacitly aware that the evidence to bolster his boss’ absurd assertions didn’t exist. Of course, more pressing for Team Trump and its associates are the legal implications. To that end, the Post added that special counsel Jack Smith’s office “has focused on exploring whether Trump and his closest advisers understood that claims of fraud in the election were baseless, even as they pressed state officials and others to overturn Biden’s victory and convinced Trump’s millions of supporters that the election had been stolen.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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