A Grand Jury Considers the Question of Whether Trump Sincerely Believed He Won ReelectionThat issue is central to Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation of the former president's response to Joe Biden's victory.
Jacob Sullum
7.14.2023
Ever since Donald Trump began claiming that he was the victim of "a major fraud" in the 2020 presidential election—which he started doing on Election Day, while votes were still being tallied—his sincerity has been open to debate. Did he really believe the nonsense he was spouting, or was it all part of a clever populist strategy? That question is of keen interest to political junkies and armchair psychologists. It is also central to Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation of whether Trump committed federal crimes by trying to overturn Joe Biden's victory.
Based on information from "four people briefed on the matter," The New York Times reports that the Washington, D.C., grand jury convened as part of Smith's investigation recently heard testimony about whether Trump "privately acknowledged in the days after the 2020 election that he had lost." One of the witnesses was Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who reportedly said "it was his impression that Mr. Trump truly believed the election was stolen."
That impression is consistent with a plausible account of why Trump embraced one wild charge after another while insisting that he actually won reelection (a position to which he still publicly clings): His inflated yet hypersensitive ego could not survive an admission of defeat, so he desperately latched onto any claim, no matter how implausible or unsubstantiated, that reinforced his self-image as a winner. The details did not matter; the main point was that he could not possibly have lost.
Nor did it matter that several of Trump's advisers, including his attorney general, viewed his claims of systematic election fraud, involving deliberately corrupted voting machines and massive dumps of phony ballots, as completely unfounded. Trump instead listened to advisers like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and John Eastman, who said what he wanted to hear: not just that Biden had stolen the election but also that the situation could be legally remedied through litigation, appeals to state officials, slates of "alternate" electors, objections by Republican legislators, and Vice President Mike Pence's intervention during the congressional tally of electoral votes on January 6.
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Source:
https://reason.com/2023/07/14/a-grand-jury-considers-the-question-of-whether-trump-sincerely-believed-he-won-reelection/
