IT WOULD BE GOOD TO KNOW JUST HOW BATSHIT CRAZY TRUMP'S ELECTION CONSPIRATORIALISM IS

Kristi Noem said something alarming on Friday:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said President Donald Trump’s administration is working hard to “make sure we have the right people voting” heading into the 2026 midterms.

Noem made the comment during a press conference in Arizona on Friday....

The secretary said elections are one of the “critical infrastructure responsibilities” that fall on her and the DHS.

Noem's department has limited electoral responsibilities. DHS is tasked with "protect[ing] the security and resilience of our nation’s election infrastructure from both cybersecurity and physical security threats," but it has no role to play whatsoever in combatting election fraud. I didn't make that up -- that's according to a fact sheet on DHS's own website, which is marked as "archived" but was most recently updated in February of last year, after Donald Trump was sworn in as president again.

Noem said this:

Kristi Noem: "When it gets to Election Day, we've been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 14, 2026 at 9:51 AM

And elections is another one of those critical infrastructure responsibilities that I have as well. And I would say that many people believe that it may be one of the most important things that we need to make sure we trust, is reliable, and that when it gets to Election Day, that we’ve been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country through the days that we have, knowing that people can trust it.

It's obvious that if you were to ask Noem what she means by "have the right people voting," she'd say she merely wants to ensure that everyone who is voting is a U.S. citizen who's properly registered to vote. She'd say "the right leaders" are candidates chosen through a clean electoral process. She'd swear on a stack of Bibles that she doesn't want to take the vote away from any legitimate voter.

But we also know she's articulating a near-universal belief in the Republican Party: that every Democratic electoral victory -- or at least every Democratic victory in a competitive race -- is the result of fraud, that if only legitimate voters are voting, only Republicans will win. Whether Noem herself actually believes this is probably irrelevant -- she and her party have been selling this lie for decades, and she knows that millions of GOP voters believe it, and will support voter suppression measures based on this belief.

We never hear this belief openly articulated by Republicans in top positions (apart from President Trump) because the mainstream press doesn't really understand how conspiratorial the thinking of the average GOP voter is on this subject. Remember, these are the same reporters who told us during the Barack Obama presidency that GOP voters didn't really believe Obama was born in Kenya. Here's a sneering Dave Weigel post published by Slate exactly fifteen years ago:

The non-partisan-but-usually-hired-by-Democrats firm Public Policy Polling is out with more data on what Republicans -- well, 400 "Republican primary voters nationwide" -- think about Barack Obama's citizenship. They have their doubts!

A 51% majority of national GOP primary voters erroneously think President Obama was not born in the U.S. 28% know that he was.

Another way of putting this is slightly more than one in four Republicans believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States. Does that mean that 72 percent of Republicans think Obama should be disqualified from the presidency? No. It suggests that birtherism has become another screen for extreme partisanship.

Republican voters don't really believe this nonsense! It's just a tribal shibboleth! But they did believe it -- and now they believe Trump won the 2020 election. They also believe that President Joe Biden let in 25 million undocumented immigrants (he didn't) so they could vote for Democrats upon arrival (House Speaker Mike Johnson in 2024: "We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.")

I want to hear some specifics from the Conspiratorialist in Chief. I think it would be a service to America if a journalist would ask the president this question:

Mr. President, you've often expressed doubts about the 2020 election. According to official records, Joe Biden won more than 81 million votes in that election. How many of those 81 million votes do you believe were legitimate?

I think it would be valuable to know just how batshit crazy Trump's beliefs are on this subject. I imagine he'd say that a majority of Biden's votes were fraudulent. He might say that Biden only won a few hundred or a few thousand legitimate votes.

Of course, I'm imagining how this would play in a country that still had a capacity to respond to delusional right-wing extremism with shock, outrage, and a determination to re-establish a reality-based government. I realize that we don't live in that kind of country.

But -- after Noem and other officials confirmed that they agreed with Trump's absurdly low estimate of Biden's legitimate vote (which would happen), and after polls showed that the majority of Republican voters also agreed with that estimate (which they would), maybe our political culture would understand just how extreme and out of touch with reality America's dominant political party is.

There are other areas where myth replaces fact for Republicans. I think Republican voters (and some in the middle) continue to support the Trump administration's immigration agenda because they believe nearly every undocumented immigrant in America is a violent felon. A journalist should ask Trump to estimate the percentage of immigrants he believes are violent felons. I'm sure he'd provide a very high number, probably something like 99% -- as would most Republican voters.

The degree to which Republicans have succumbed to disinformation in the Fox News era is something we need to confront. But I don't think that reckoning will ever happen.