Birtherism and Donald Trump’s Republican Party

The conspiracy theory Republicans are using to try to de-legitimize the 2020 presidential election is just the latest iteration of the racist conspiracy theory that put Donald Trump on his inexorable path to the Republican nomination:

Trump made his first serious foray into national politics with “birtherism,” the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born outside the United States, making him an illegal president. It was a public expression of Trump’s belief that citizenship is tied to blood and ethnicity — that some Americans are Americans, some are less so and some just aren’t.

The voter fraud conspiracy to which Trump hitched his attempt to hold onto power falls under the same umbrella, an attempt to write millions of Americans out of the electorate on the basis of race and heritage, instead of just one person out of the office of the presidency.

The essence of the campaign’s legal and political argument, after all, is that Trump won the election, or would have, if not for mass electoral fraud, all in swing states and only then in those cities with sizable Black populations, specifically Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. To right the ship, his campaign asked various courts to toss out votes in these cities, invalidating hundreds of thousands of Black votes to hand the president a second term.

Here is Rudy Giuliani saying exactly this without shame or embarrassment at a news conference last week:

“The margin in Michigan is 146,121 and these ballots were all cast basically in Detroit that Biden won 80-20. So you see it changes the result of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County. So it’s a very significant case.”

And the other crucial thing these conspiracy theories have in common with birtherism is that Republican elites are at best complicit in spreading them through silence. And why wouldn’t they? When Robin Vos defends gerrymandering a permanent Republican majority irrespective of the voters because votes in Milwaukee and Madison shouldn’t count, he’s just taking the party line, up to the nation’s most elite Republican lawyers. Denying equal citizenship to Black Americans is simply the foundational principle of the contemporary Republican Party, and will remain so even after Trump leaves office.