Several of Donald Trump‘s former senior aides have testified before a special House committee investigating his participation in the Jan. 6 uprising that they didn’t believe his lies about the 2020 race and that the former president knew he would lose to Joe Biden.
However, rather than persuading Trump’s most ardent supporters, testimony from former Attorney General Bill Barr and Trump’s daughter Ivanka about the election and the attack on the United States Capitol has prompted many of them to simply restate their belief that the former president was correct in his false claim of victory.
Trump was repeatedly told there was no election fraud, according to Barr’s testimony. According to one false story that went viral this week, he was paid off by a voting machine firm. Ivanka Trump claiming that she, too, did not believe Trump? It’s all part of Trump’s master plan to deceive his adversaries and preserve the United States.
The allegations underscore how entrenched Trump’s fake electoral narrative has become.
“It’s cognitive dissonance,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a Syracuse University professor who has examined how Trump mobilized his following through social media and advertising. “If you trust what Trump says, and now Bill Barr and Trump’s own daughter are saying these other things, it leaves a gap that needs to be filled.”
One of the purposes of the hearings into the deadly attack on the US Capitol, according to the legislators conducting the investigation, is to illustrate how Trump regularly lied to his supporters in order to maintain power and damage American democracy.
“President Trump spent millions of dollars of campaign funding promoting misleading information, airing commercials he knew were fraudulent and convinced millions of Americans that the election was rigged and he was the actual president,” said Vice-Chair Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. “As you will see, the violence on January 6th was sparked by a misinformation campaign.”
Barr’s testimony was especially upsetting for those who believe Trump’s bogus assertions. He described Trump’s many ludicrous accusations concerning the 2020 election in his testimony with investigators, calling them “bogus” and “idiotic.”
“There was never an indication of curiosity in what the actual facts were,” Barr told the committee when he spoke with Trump.
“If he truly believes this, he’s become removed from reality,” Barr remarked.
Following Barr’s testimony, many Trump fans slammed him as a traitor, pointing out that he’d previously challenged Trump’s election claims on sites like Reddit, GETTR, and Telegram.
Many others, on the other hand, began to look for alternate explanations for this testimony.
On a popular Telegram channel for Trump supporters, one poster stated, “I’m still hopeful Barr is playing a role.”
Barr was allegedly paid by Dominion Voting Systems, a corporation targeted by Trump and his followers with bogus charges of vote manipulation, according to a widely circulated post this week. “According to SEC filings, DOMINION PAID BARR $1.2 million in cash and gave him another $1.1 million in stock awards from 2009 to 2018.” (It’s no surprise Barr hasn’t discovered any voter fraud!)” read the post.
It’s the wrong Dominion. Dominion Energy, a publicly-traded firm based in Richmond, Virginia that distributes power and heat to customers in six Mid-Atlantic states, compensated Barr.
Unlike Barr, Ivanka Trump has maintained a strong following among Trump loyalists and is considered as a possible successor to her father. That could explain why so many people had to come up with a different reason for why she told Congress she didn’t believe her father’s assertions.
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According to Jordan Sather, a key proponent of the QAnon theory, both Barr and Ivanka Trump lied during their testimony on Trump’s orders, as part of an intricate conspiracy to confuse Congress and the American public in order to defeat Trump’s opponents.
“I can easily picture Donald Trump telling Ivanka: ‘Hey, go to this hearing and say these things.'” “Fuck with their heads,” Sather stated on his internet broadcast last week.
Ivanka Trump’s testimony was largely disregarded by Trump supporters, who questioned whether any of it was true. On far-right message forums, this is another common refrain. Many posters claim that the hearings are a Hollywood production starring stand-ins for the former president’s daughter and others and that they aren’t really taking place.
“She looks drastically different,” one Telegram user observed. “CGI?”
