The refusal by many leading Republicans to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election is tainting American democracy — and threatening to make Jan. 6, 2021 a prelude to something far more ominous in late 2024 or early 2025.

Everybody by now knows that Donald Trump, against all evidence, insists that there was a nefarious and complex plot to fabricate votes and stuff ballot boxes in all the swing states he lost. In his mind, there happen to have been more than 10,457 votes invented or stolen by Democrats in Arizona; 11,779 in Georgia; 20,682 in Wisconsin; 80,555 in Pennsylvania; and a whopping 154,188 in Michigan.

Of course, most of Trump’s fever dreams focus on Democratic-run big cities — but it’s generally in the suburbs and elsewhere that Biden most decisively outperformed Trump. In many of those supposedly rigged big cities, Trump outperformed expectations. Some conspiracy that would’ve been.

Every recount disproves the Trump fiction. Every court has rejected his fabrications. Yet in this anti-fact era, others in the Republican Party who ought to have strong independent voices are cowering and timidly toeing the line, smearing the American democratic system and leading to a dangerous epidemic of distrust in the process.

It’s not just JD Vance, who in the vice presidential debate against Tim Walz refused to say that Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. The last Trump veep pick, Mike Pence, had the decency and integrity to affirm that Biden won, and to say, “‘Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president.” That’s what made him a forever Trump enemy. Vance doesn’t have a fraction of those guts.

Now comes the second most powerful Republican in America, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Sunday morning, he was asked whether he could “unequivocally” say that Biden won the 2020 election. He delivered this masterpiece of mealymouthedness.

“See, this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with leading Republicans. It’s a gotcha game,” Johnson said. “You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future. We’re not gonna talk about what happened in 2020, we’re gonna talk about 2024 and how we’re gonna solve the problems for the American people.”

2020 is not ancient history; the question of who was the rightful winner of that election bears directly on the one that will crescendo in less than a month.

Because of lies like Trump’s and inelegant non-answers like Vance’s and Johnson’s, more than a third of U.S. adults think Biden’s win was illegitimate. (Trump, back in March, actually said “82% of the country understands that it was a rigged election”— yet another obscene lie from Trump. But even 10% would be too high.)

In 2020, Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump’s 232. Depending on final state vote counts, and after all legitimate challenges work their way through respective states’ systems, Trump and Kamala Harris will divvy up 538 available Electoral College votes and one of them will come out on top this year.

In 2020, Trump decided to declare victory no matter the actual outcome. Be sure that’s his plan again this time. Be very, very afraid of where that may lead us.

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