THE SAVE ACT ISN'T JIM CROW -- IT'S MORE DELUSIONAL

In a column about the SAVE Act -- Donald Trump's top domestic priority -- Jamelle Bouie writes:

For reasons of both ego and ideology, Trump does not believe that he can legitimately lose an election. He is, to his mind, the living embodiment of the nation. If he doesn’t win, then the system must be broken. In that sense, the SAVE Act is far less about American elections as they exist than it is about the president’s vision of American society. The basic premise of Trumpism is that the people of the United States are not the collected citizens of the United States, naturalized and natural born, but a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump.

The SAVE Act is an attempt to make that distinction a political reality by removing as many mere Americans from the voting pool as possible and elevating the true people of the United States — who just so happen to support Trump and the Republican Party — as the only legitimate players in American political life. The goal, then, is to nationalize something akin to what many Americans experienced in the Jim Crow South: a one-party state, backed by the threat of violence, where the law ensures that most people cannot hope for meaningful political representation.

This isn't exactly right. The people who put Jim Crow voting laws in place knew that the Blacks they were disenfranchising were real people born in America who would be allowed to vote if the federal government were able and willing to force the issue. It's my belief that Donald Trump -- influenced by a couple of decades' worth of Republican propaganda -- believes that there simply aren't enough legitimate Democratic voters in America to make the Democratic Party a competitive party. When he says of Democrats, as he did in a speech earlier this month, "They're doing everything possible because they know if we get this, they probably won't win an election for 50 years and maybe longer," I think he legitimately believes that the large number of voters purged from the rolls by the SAVE Act will (a) be overwhelmingly Democratic and (b) be on the rolls fraudulently.

Trump believes this -- believes that all these voters are non-citizen immigrants or dead people or nonexistent people or people otherwise ineligible to vote, possibly because they live on dementia wards or in mental institutions and votes are cast for Democrats in their names -- because he's a Fox News grandpa who's been told over and over again that Democrats cheat in elections on a industrial scale. Millions of other Fox News grandpas and grandmas also believe this.

Here's a video from 2010.



It was produced by an organization called True the Vote, which I've written about many times. After the 2020 election, True the Vote was behind the Dinesh D'Souza "documentary" 2000 Mules, which is so rife with disinformation that even D'Souza himself has had to apologize for its dishonesty. Here's the first claim in the 2010 video, from the late right-wing propagandist David Horowitz:

The voting system is under attack now. Movements that are focused on voter fraud and the integrity of elections are crucial at this point. This is really -- I mean, this is a war! A Democratic Party consultant once told me that Republicans have to win by at least three percent in order to win any election.

The next speaker says:

There are people who are deceased who have shown up as voting. I've actually gone out and taken pictures of the tombstones.

The third speaker -- Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of True the Vote -- says:

One lady asked the presiding judge, she looked at him and she goes, "I forget who I'm supposed to vote for," and so he went over there and he actually turned the dial. She pressed Enter. He turned the dial. She pressed Enter.

Trump thinks this is routine. Your Fox-watching relatives think so too. They believe all this happens and they believe that millions of immigrants cross the border and are immediately signed up to vote (always Democratic) and they believe that Democrats slip fake ballots in among the real ones during vote counting and they believe Democrats tamper with voting machines so Republican votes flip to Democratic and...

Jim Crow vote suppressors knew that there were real Americans who would vote against them if they were allowed to. Millions of Republicans seem to believe that there are no legitimate Democratic votes, or very, very few.

They believe this even though they can never produce evidence of this fraud. They believe it the same way they believe that every anti-Trump protestor is a paid agent of the Soros family.

So Trump and his supporters don't exactly believe, as Bouie writes, that "the people of the United States are ... a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump," excluding Trump critics -- they believe there simply aren't very many sincere Trump critics, or very many Democrats at all, citizens who oppose Trump and his party sincerely and legitimately.

All this, of course, requires them to ignore large chunks of objective reality. But the propaganda they consume has taught them that what everyone outside their bubble portrays as reality must be a lie because people outside their bubble do nothing but lie. Everything they don't want to believe is "fake news." And everything they want to believe is the gospel truth.

I think Trump sincerely believes all this. I'm sure his most fervent fans do. They think the SAVE Act won't disenfranchise a single legitimate voter. It will only disenfranchise Democrats, who are illegitimate voters by definition.