TRUMP VERDICT A TRIUMPH FOR ELECTION DENIAL. It’s been eight years since Democrats were stunned by Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Many in the party refused to accept what happened. No, they did not deny that Trump was president of the United States or the plain fact that he was sitting in the White House, but they did not believe the election was legitimate or legal. 

Wild theories took hold among Democrats and their allies in the media. Some said Trump had made a deal with Vladimir Putin in which Russia would help Trump win and then Trump would reward Russia with favorable treatment. The rumormongering was turbocharged when the FBI opened an investigation and then, in the days before Trump took office in January 2017, when media outlets began reporting on a mysterious “dossier” purported to contain intelligence reports detailing Trump’s alleged dealings with Russia.

It is hard to exaggerate the fervor with which Democrats, former Republican Never Trumpers, and many in the media embraced the theory that came to be known as Trump-Russia “collusion.” The FBI investigation turned into a special counsel investigation, led by former FBI chief Robert Mueller, and aggressive prosecutors dug into the case for two years, using the full powers of law enforcement. And then, in 2019, Mueller issued a report that said he and those aggressive prosecutors had been unable to establish that conspiracy or coordination between Trump and Russia, the legal words for collusion, ever took place. Beyond that, while there was no doubt that Russia attempted to meddle in the U.S. election, there was no evidence that the Russian efforts had any effect at all on the outcome in any state. Disappointment descended over the anti-Trump world, although the president’s adversaries quickly retooled to impeach Trump over another topic, Ukraine, in hopes of damaging his chances of reelection in 2020.

But they never gave up their belief in Russian interference. Despite Mueller’s findings, they continued to believe that Trump and Russia had conspired for an illegitimate victory. “[Trump] knows he’s an illegitimate president,” Clinton said in 2019, after the release of the Mueller report. A Democratic icon, the late Rep. John Lewis, also called Trump “illegitimate.” And as the 2020 campaign got underway, at a campaign event in New Hampshire in 2019, a woman told candidate Joe Biden that Trump was “an illegitimate president.” Biden’s response was, “Look, folks, I absolutely agree.”

The preferred expression for many Democrats was that we will “never know” if Trump-Russia collusion made the difference in the results. “We will never know whether the Russian intervention was determinative in such a close election,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said in 2017.

In the years from 2016 to 2020, Democrats were the party of election denial. But in late 2020, of course, Trump refused to concede the results of the 2020 presidential election. He and the Republicans who claimed that the election had been stolen became the election deniers. Democrats leaped on the cause, taking every opportunity to bash Trump and his party as election deniers, even though they themselves had been denying the results of the 2016 election for years at that point.

Now things have changed again. With the conviction of Trump in Manhattan, Democrats have achieved the greatest victory ever for election denialism. The thrust of Democratic prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump was that Trump falsified his company’s documents to cover up an effort to corrupt the 2016 election. “The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 election,” said prosecutor, and recent top Biden administration official, Matthew Colangelo in opening arguments. “Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records.” A short time later, Colangelo said: “It was election fraud, pure and simple.” And still later, he said Trump’s actions constituted “an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of a presidential election.”

As the trial went on, the jury heard repeated prosecution accusations that Trump had interfered in the 2016 election. And guess what Bragg’s prosecutors said after that? They said we will “never know” whether Trump’s so-called election interference determined the result of the 2016 election. “We will never know, and it doesn’t matter, if this conspiracy was the difference-maker in a close election,” Colangelo told the jury in opening statements. That of course implied that it might have been the difference-maker. With that, the Democratic election denial machine was up and running in a Manhattan courtroom.

The theme played a key role in the prosecution’s closing arguments, from prosecutor Joshua Steinglass. “Of course, we will never know if this effort to hoodwink the American voter made the difference in the 2016 election,” Steinglass told the jury, adding that it is “not something we have to prove.”

Obviously they didn’t prove that at all. But they did prove that 2016 election denialism never went away. At this point, it seems fair to say that Trump’s victory in 2016 dealt a terrible blow to the Democratic psyche, one that has made Democrats seek retribution for eight years, so far. Yes, they have launched prosecutions of Trump over the 2020 election, but the prosecution in Manhattan seemed to spring from some deep and unhealed wound in the Democratic Party’s self-image. Now, Bragg, Colangelo, Steinglass, and the other prosecutors have avenged that loss, but it is not clear whether the wound will ever heal.