Making her case to Republican voters before next month’s primary in her state, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) released a new ad succinctly capturing how Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election are being weaponized.
“The fake news, big tech and blue state liberals stole the election from President Trump,” Ivey says in the spot, which is titled “Stole.” She later adds that “the left is probably offended. So be it.”
Ivey’s assertion that the election was stolen is indefensible nonsense. But the specific phrasing of it, suggesting a conspiracy that involved the machinations of those long-hated elites rather than some cadre of as-yet-unidentified poll workers and schemers, is exactly how non-Trump Republicans plan to appeal to the voters who have been convinced that Trump was the real winner.
From the earliest days of his candidacy, Donald Trump forced Republicans and the conservative media to figure out how to make his most extreme rhetoric defensible, if not palatable. Trump would say something and his base of supporters would quickly seize on it. His allies were left playing catch up, needing to both nod along with Trump in order not to alienate voters or viewers but while still often insisting on some tether to reality.
So the specific claim that Trump Tower had been wiretapped became a story about intelligence agencies revealing the identity of someone who had been talking to Russia’s ambassador. The insistence that the Russia probe was a witch hunt — offered even...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...