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If you are referring to J. Smollett, he is not unique. There are just some people who make up being the victims of crimes. Their motivations vary.Some want attention for various reasons. Some seem political, as the following list is of incidents that occurred shortly before Trump was elected to November 2018 and many implicate his supporters as the suspects.Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, a historically black church in Mississippi was burned in an arson attack and “Vote Trump” was scrawled on the building. After much outcry about a suspected hate crime, police arrested a black member of the church, whom they said had non-political motives.On election night, Chris Ball, a white Canadian man, said he was beaten by anti-gay Trump supporters in Santa Monica, California. His friend shared a photo of Ball’s supposedly bloodied face to social media. Police said Ball never reported an attack of checked into a local hospital.A pro-gay Episcopal church in Indiana was vandalized w/“Heil Trump,” a swastika, & an anti-gay slur. Turns out it was the gay organ player who did it. He was only charged w/a misdemeanor.A day after the election, cars and a house on a street in Philadelphia were tagged with racist and pro-Trump messages. A black man was charged with vandalism and related offenses.In a dramatic social media post, a black woman recounted being threatened by an armed group of four racist white men outside a Delaware gas station. After the post went viral, she reported that the men had been arrested. Police denied any such incident had even been reported, and the woman refused to speak to reporters.Two white Babson College students drove through nearby Wellesley College in Massachusetts waving a Trump flag to celebrate his election victory. They were kicked out of their fraternity and condemened in a letter by faculty over social media rumors that they had spat on a Wellesley student and shouted racist and homophobic slurs. An investigation by Babson cleared them of any wrongdoing.A black student at Bowling Green State University in Ohio told police that three white boys in Trump shirts threw rocks at her and called her a racist epithet. Her story got a lot of attention online, but police found it inconsistent, and concluded based on her text messages that she had lied out of frustration with Trump-supporting family members. She was charged with falsification and obstructing official business.A Muslim student at the University of Louisiana said two white men, one wearing a “Trump” hat, assaulted and robbed her near campus. She said they ripped off her hijab and called her a racist slur. The claims caused a national media sensation, but police later said she made up the story and charged her with filing a false report.A black student at Villanova University in Pennsylvania said she was knocked down by young white men yelling “Trump!” However, she refused to cooperate with police or university administrators, who then clammed up about what they had discovered.After a University of Michigan student told police that man threatened to set her hijab on fire, the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said the attack was “just the latest anti-Muslim incident reported since the election of Donald Trump as president.” Police discovered that the student fabricated the story.A photo shared on Twitter drew opprobrium to a banner on the side of a Bay Area home that said, “You can hang an [N-word] from a tree, equal rights he’ll never see.” Neighbors and commenters were sure that a racist was gloating over Trump’s victory, but it turned out that an elderly black man had been displaying the sign for months as a protest of the treatment of African-Americans. He was ticketed for overlarge signage.A stairwell at Williams College in Massachusetts was vandalized with fake blood at the words “AMKKK KILL.” Campus police alerted state police and the FBI before their investigation led them to two students. The young men admitted they had it done to “bring attention to the effects of the presidential election on many within our community,” according to the college president.A bisexual student at North Park University in Chicago said she had received pro-Trump and anti-gay emails and notes taped to her door. An investigation by the university found that she had “fabricated” the claims, and announced she was no longer enrolled at the school.A black man in Boston told police that at least two white men called him a racist slur, referred to lynching, and warned him, This is “Trump country now.” After police launched a hate crime investigation, the man admitted he made up the whole incident.A white University of Michigan student reported that a Trump supporter scratched her face, saying that the attack was part of a surge in hate crimes following Trump’s election. She later pleaded guilty to filing a false report and admitted in court that she scratched her own face with a pin. She said she had been depressed.A young Muslim woman claimed that three men screaming “Donald Trump” attacked her on a Manhattan subway. She said they called her a terrorist and tried to pull off her hijab. But police found that she was lying, reportedly to get attention, and charged her with filing a false report.Swastikas and KKK graffiti found on the Nassau Community College campus on Long Island were widely attributed to Trump’s election. Police arrested an Indian-American student, who they said was motivated by grievances with the local Jewish community.A wave of nearly 150 bomb threats to US Jewish institutions was widely blamed on Trump’s rhetoric. A left-wing black journalist and a US-Israeli man were ultimately jailed for their roles in the scare. These are listed, because I don’t believe the men had any intent of carrying these threats out. They just seemed to want to make it appear there was a raised danger level to non White folks.Racist slurs, a swastika, and “#muslimban” were found spray-painted outside a Muslim student’s dorm room at Beloit College in Wisconsin. The student later confessed to targeting himself. Police said he sought to compete with a real anti-Semitic act of vandalism days earlier. He was charged with obstructing, disorderly conduct, and criminal damage.Someone firebombed a grocery store run by Indian immigrants in North Carolina and left a note saying “Trump is our nation builder for White America.” Based on surveillance footage, a black man was charged with related crimes, including ethnic intimidation.Mass protests against “institutional racism” shut down classes at St. Olaf College in Minnesota after a black student found a racist note on her car and posted photos of it to social media. College President David R. Anderson later announced the message was a hoax by a student who wanted “to draw attention to concerns about the campus climate.”The car of a young black man in Kansas was covered in racist graffiti and a threat. He later admitted he had defaced his own vehicle, but was not charged with a crime.A Muslim woman from Long Island said a group of teens yelled “Trump 2016” at her and told her “she didn’t belong here,” before leaving slashing her car tires and leaving a note reading “Go home.” She later admitted to police that she made up the whole affair. They gave her a ticket.In the wake of a deadly shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, Trump supporters were blamed for anti-Semitic graffiti – like “Kill All Jews” and “Die Jew Rats” – and setting fires at Brooklyn Jewish institutions. A mentally ill gay black man who had worked on a city council initiative to fight hate crimes was later charged for the acts.A note reading “Beware [N-words] live here” was posted on the door of an apartment at Kansas State University. The resident of the apartment admitted to police that she had written the note.More than 100 students at Goucher College in Baltimore protested to demand social justice training, safe spaces, and “accountability” after Nazi, and KKK graffiti was found on campus. Trump and white supremacy were blamed. A black student later admitted he was behind the racist vandalism, attributing his actions to “bottled up anger.” He was charged with malicious destruction of property.All of the listed incidents were compiled by Andy Ngo Damning List of Hate Crime Hoaxes Proves Jussie Smollett Happens Way More Than Libs Want to AdmitSome want to avoid trouble like the girl in California, who claimed she was kidnapped and escaped. In reality she had ditched school and didn’t want to get in trouble. The lady in Texas, who drowned her babies and said some Black guy did it. The numerous claims of rape against Black men in the past that have proven to be false when the “victim’s” later confessed to lying.For others, the motive is unknown, like the girl who claimed a college hockey team raped her. The girl who claimed she was kidnapped and raped and had racial slurs written on her naked body. She wrote the slurs herself.These people do a lot of harm to actual victims. They put doubt in the minds of people about real victims and real perpetrators. The real victim of rapes and crimes based on bigotry are greeted with doubt, instead of sympathy and support. The perpetrators may get support, rather than scorn.In Smollett’s case, if he ever confesses, he will probably try to justify what he did by claiming he was just trying to bring attention to the bigotry and hatred Black men and Gays face everyday. But how in touch with the history of that bigotry and hatred can he really be, if he left a noose hanging around his own neck? One of the things my male Black friends had in common when they voiced doubt about his story from the very beginning was, “What Black man would have two White men beat him up, put a noose around his neck and after the White guys left, leave the noose around his neck?” Not one of my Black friends, that’s for sure.

SUNDOWN, Texas (Reuters) - Brett Fryar is a middle-class Republican. A 50-year-old chiropractor in this west Texas town, he owns a small business. He has two undergraduate degrees and a master’s degree, in organic chemistry. He attends Southcrest Baptist Church in nearby Lubbock.Fryar didn’t much like Donald Trump at first, during the U.S. president’s 2016 campaign. He voted for Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries.Now, Fryar says he would go to war for Trump. He has joined the newly formed South Plains Patriots, a group of a few hundred members that includes a “reactionary” force of about three dozen - including Fryar and his son, Caleb - who conduct firearms training.ADVERTISEMENTNothing will convince Fryar and many others here in Sundown - including the town’s mayor, another Patriots member - that Democrat Joe Biden won the Nov. 3 presidential election fairly. They believe Trump’s stream of election-fraud allegations and say they’re preparing for the possibility of a “civil war” with the American political left."If President Trump comes out and says: 'Guys, I have irrefutable proof of fraud, the courts won't listen, and I'm now calling on Americans to take up arms,' we would go," said Fryar, wearing a button-down shirt, pressed slacks and a paisley tie during a recent interview at his office.The unshakable trust in Trump in this town of about 1,400 residents reflects a national phenomenon among many Republicans, despite the absence of evidence in a barrage of post-election lawsuits by the president and his allies. About half of Republicans polled by Reuters/Ipsos said Trump “rightfully won” the election but had it stolen from him in systemic fraud favoring Biden, according to a survey conducted between Nov. 13 and 17. Just 29% of Republicans said Biden rightfully won. Other polls since the election have reported that an even higher proportion - up to 80% - of Republicans trust Trump’s baseless fraud narrative.Trump’s legal onslaught has so far flopped, with judges quickly dismissing many cases and his lawyers dropping or withdrawing from others. None of the cases contain allegations - much less evidence - that are likely to invalidate enough votes to overturn the election, election experts say.And yet the election-theft claims are proving politically potent. All but a handful of Republican lawmakers have backed Trump’s fraud claims or stayed silent, effectively freezing the transition of power as the president refuses to concede. Trump has succeeded in sowing further public distrust in the media, which typically calls elections, and undermined citizens’ faith in the state and local election officials who underpin American http://democracy.In Reuters interviews with 50 Trump voters, all said they believed the election was rigged or in some way illegitimate. Of those, 20 said they would consider accepting Biden as their president, but only in light of proof that the election was conducted fairly. Most repeated debunked conspiracy theories espoused by Trump, Republican officials and conservative media claiming that millions of votes were dishonestly switched to Biden in key states by biased poll workers and hacked voting machines.ADVERTISEMENTMany voters interviewed by Reuters said they formed their opinions by watching emergent right-wing media outlets such as Newsmax and One American News Network that have amplified Trump’s fraud claims. Some have boycotted Fox News out of anger that the network called Biden the election winner and that some of its news anchors - in contrast to its opinion show stars - have been skeptical of Trump’s fraud allegations.“I just sent Fox News an email,” Fryar said, telling the network: “You’re the only news I’ve watched for the last six years, but I will not watch you anymore.”The widespread rejection of the election result among Republicans reflects a new and dangerous dynamic in American politics: the normalization of false and increasingly extreme conspiracy theories among tens of millions of mainstream voters, according to government scholars, analysts and some lawmakers on both sides of the political divide. The trend has deeply troubling long-term implications for American political and civic institutions, said Paul Light, a veteran political scientist at New York University (NYU)."This is dystopian," Light said. "America could fracture.”Adam Kinzinger, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, is among the few party members to publicly recognize Biden’s victory. He called his Republican colleagues’ reluctance to reject Trump’s conspiracies a failure of political courage that threatens to undermine American democracy for years. If citizens lose faith in election integrity, that could lead to “really bad things,” including violence and social unrest, he said in an interview.David Gergen - an adviser to four previous U.S. presidents, two Democrats and two Republicans - said Trump is trying to “kneecap” the Biden administration before it takes power, noting this is the first time a sitting American president has tried to overthrow an election result.ADVERTISEMENTIt may not be the last time. Many Republicans see attacks on election integrity as a winning issue for future campaigns - including the next presidential race, according to one Republican operative close to the Trump campaign. The party, the person said, is setting up a push for “far more stringent oversight on voting procedures in 2024,” when the party’s nominee will likely be Trump or his anointed successor.Other Republicans urged patience and faith in the government. Charlie Black, a veteran Republican strategist, does not believe Republican lawmakers will continue backing Trump’s fraud claims after Biden is inaugurated. They will need White House cooperation on basic government functions, such as appropriations and defense bills, he said."People will come to see we still have a functioning government,” Black said, and Republicans will become “resigned to Biden, and see it’s not the end of the world.”The Biden campaign declined to comment for this story. Boris Epshteyn, a strategic advisor to the Trump campaign, said: “The President and his campaign are confident that when every legal vote is counted, and every illegal vote is not, it will be determined that President Trump has won re-election to a second term.”‘THERE’S JUST NO WAY’Media outlets declared Biden the election winner on Nov. 7. As calls were finalized in battleground states, Biden’s lead in the Electoral College that decides the presidency widened to 306 to 232. (For a graphic explaining the electoral college, see: tmsnrt.rs/38VTUvK )ADVERTISEMENTMany Republican voters scoff at those results, convinced Trump was cheated. Raymond Fontaine, a hardware store owner in Oakville, Connecticut, said Biden’s vote total - the highest of any presidential candidate in history - makes no sense because the 78-year-old Democrat made relatively few campaign appearances and seemed to be in mental decline."You are going to tell me 77 million Americans voted for him? There is just no way," said Fontaine, 50.The latest popular vote total for Biden has grown to about 79 million, compared to some 73 million for Trump.Like many Trump supporters interviewed by Reuters, Fontaine was deeply suspicious of computerized voting machines. Trump and his allies have alleged, without producing evidence, a grand conspiracy to manipulate votes through the software used in many battleground states.In Grant County, West Virginia - a mountainous region where more than 88% of voters backed the president - trust in Trump runs deep. Janet Hedrick, co-owner of the Smoke Hole Caverns log cabin resort in the small town of Cabins, said she would never accept Biden as a legitimate president."There's millions and millions of Trump votes that were just thrown out,” said Hedrick, 70, a retired teacher and librarian. “That computer was throwing them out.”ADVERTISEMENTAt the Sunset Restaurant in Moorefield, West Virginia - a diner featuring omelettes, hotcakes and waitresses who remember your order - a mention of the election sparked a spirited discussion at one table. Gene See, a retired highway construction inspector, and Bob Hyson, a semi-retired insurance sales manager, said Trump had been cheated, that Biden had dementia and that Democrats planned all along to quickly replace Biden with his more liberal running mate for vice president, Kamala Harris."I think if they ever get to the bottom of it, they will find massive fraud," said another of the diners, Larry Kessel, a 67-year-old farmer.Kessel’s wife, Jane, patted him on the arm, trying to calm him, as he grew agitated while railing against anti-Trump media bias.Trump’s rage against the media has lately included rants against Fox News. He has pushed his supporters towards more right-wing outlets such as Newsmax and One America News Network, which have championed the president’s fraud claims.Rory Wells, 51, a New Jersey lawyer who attended a pro-Trump “stop the steal” election protest in Trenton last week, said he now watches Newsmax because Fox isn’t sufficiently conservative.“I like that I get to hear from Rudy Giuliani and others who are not immediately discounted as being crazy,” he said of Trump’s lead election lawyer.ADVERTISEMENTNewsmax CEO Chris Ruddy said the network’s viewership has exploded since the election, with nearly 3 million viewers nightly via cable television and streaming video devices.Ruddy said Newsmax isn’t saying that Biden stole the election - but they’re also not calling him the winner given that Trump has valid legal claims. “The same media who said Biden would win in a landslide now want to not have recounts,” he said in a phone interview.Charles Herring, president of One America News Network, said in a statement that his network has seen three weeks of record ratings, as “frustrated Fox News viewers” have tuned in.‘NO WAY IN HELL’Some Trump supporters said they would accept Biden as the winner if that is the final, official result. Janel Henritz, 36, echoed some others in saying that she believed the election included fraud, but perhaps not enough to change the outcome. Henritz, who works alongside her mother Janet Hedrick at their log cabin resort in West Virginia, said she would accept the outcome if Biden remains the winner after recounts and court challenges."Then he won fair and square," she said.ADVERTISEMENTIn Sundown, Texas, Mayor Jonathan Strickland said there’s "no way in hell" Biden won fairly. The only way he’ll believe it, he said, is if Trump himself says so.“Trump is the only one we’ve been able to trust for the last four years,” said Strickland, an oilfield production engineer. “As far as the civil war goes, I don’t think it’s off the table.”If it comes to a fight, Caleb Fryar is ready. But the 26-year-old son of Brett Fryar, the chiropractor, said he hoped Trump’s fraud allegations would instead spark a massive mobilization of Republican voters in future elections.Asked whether Trump might be duping his followers, he said it’s hard to fathom.“If I’m being manipulated by Trump ... then he is the greatest con man that ever lived in America,” Caleb Fryar said. “I think he’s the greatest patriot that ever lived.”(This story corrects to delete reference in first paragraph to Brett Fryar teaching Sunday school and bible studies at Southcrest Baptist Church. He taught those classes at another church.)ADVERTISEMENT(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Texas, Nathan Layne in West Virginia and Tim Reid in California; editing by Brian Thevenot)Incoming GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and other supporters of President Trump protest the election results outside the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Nov. 7. (Kevin D. Liles/for The Washington Post)Elena Parent, a Democratic state lawmaker from the Atlanta area, listened incredulously in a small hearing room in early December as a stream of witnesses spun fantastical tales of alleged election fraud before the Georgia Senate’s Judiciary Committee.A retired Army colonel claimed the state’s voting machines were controlled by Communists from Venezuela. A volunteer lawyer with President Trump’s campaign shared surveillance video that she said showed election workers in Atlanta counting “suitcases” of phony ballots that swung Georgia’s election to former vice president Joe Biden. The president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, told the panel: “Every single vote should be taken away from Biden.”“Since this has been debunked repeatedly, what evidence can you give to us that counters what our elections officials presented us with only an hour ago?” Parent asked one of the witnesses, her voice rising in exasperation. When she tried to ask a follow-up question, the Republican committee chairman cut her off.AdHer questions — and the fact that the claims were misleading, unsubstantiated or just plain false — did little to keep the rumors in check. It didn’t matter that state and local election officials had explained what was in the video and conducted a hand recount to show that the machines were not rigged. It didn’t matter that multiple news outlets detailed, over and over, that there was no evidence of widespread fraud. It didn’t matter that, amid a global pandemic and massive demand for mail ballots, a system under historic strain in fact held up decisively.To preserve his hold on power, Trump has spent the weeks since Election Day promoting falsehoodsabout voting problems in Georgia and five other states, successfully persuading tens of millions of his supporters to believe a lie — that the election was stolen from him, and from them.He has done so by harnessing the power of his position, using his pulpit at the White House and his Twitter feed to let loose a fusillade of conspiracy theories. His assault on the integrity of the election has gotten a hefty assist from pro-Trump media outfits and an assortment of state lawmakers and lawyers who gave oxygen to the debunked allegations — and a majority of congressional Republicans, who called on the Supreme Court to overturn the results in four states.Control of the Senate rests in the hands of Georgia voters in the Jan. 5 runoff election that will determine two seats. (The Washington Post)Trump is continuing to press his case, even now that the electoral college has formally elected Biden. In a meeting with allies on Friday, the president discussed deploying the military to rerun the election and appointing attorney Sidney Powell, whose conspiracy theories about election fraud have been widely discredited, as a special counsel to investigate the outcome.Along the way, Trump has willfully damaged two bedrocks of American democracy that he has been going after for years: confidence in the media as a source of trusted information and faith in systems of government. It might be one of his lasting legacies.A Fox News poll released on Dec. 11shows that more than a third of registered voters believe the election was stolen from Trump — a number that rises to 77 percent among those who voted for Trump. Conversely, 56 percent of voters believe Trump weakened American democracy by contesting election results in various states, with the number rising to 85 percent among those who voted for Biden, according to the poll.Trump’s campaign spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, declined to answer specific questions about the damage the president has done or the untruths he embraced.“President Trump owes it to the 75 million Americans who voted for him — and to those who voted for Joe Biden — to ensure that the election was free, fair and secure,” he said.Even now that the electoral college has voted, and the GOP’s top leaders have publicly accepted Biden’s victory, both parties and the country overall must reckon with the mark Trump has left on American democracy. Biden will start his presidency with nearly half the country believing he is not the legitimate occupant of the White House. Many Americans who voted against Trump and have watched with horror as he has tried to subvert the results are equally disillusioned about the strength of the system, which they fear could have toppled but for the courage of a cadre of election officials, state Republicansand judges who held the line.Few anticipate that the mistrust and divisions will fade with the 45th president’s departure from the White House. One reason: The most ardent purveyors of unfounded accusations say they have no plans to back down.“The fact is that President Trump was reelected by what will be known soon to be a landslide victory unparalleled in this country,” said L. Lin Wood, a Georgia lawyer and Trump ally who has filed unsuccessful lawsuits on the president’s behalf.Wood said he spoke to the president in a phone call earlier this month, encouraging him not to concede in what he described as “a battle between good and evil.”Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School and co-director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, said that kind of rhetoric has emboldened some in the country to doubt the results merely because their preferred candidate lost.“We’re entering a very dangerous phase where a sizable share of the population has no faith in the basic mechanics of the democracy,” Persily said. Millions of voters, he added, now see the fight over who should lead the country as a function of “the willingness to exert power as opposed to playing by fair rules of the game.”A base willing to believeTrump has demonstrated a unique capacity to rally supporters to his war cries, even when they are false or unproven. He gained notoriety nearly a decade ago as the leader of the so-called birther movement, asserting falsely that then-President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.This year, Trump’s obsession with election fraud has tested his followers anew, and their willingness to go along with him has shown how powerful his hold is on the GOP.Thousands of President Trump’s supporters converged on Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14 to falsely claim he won the election. (The Washington Post)The president’s false claims about voting ramped up in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when election officials were gearing up for a historic surge in mail balloting. He got help from a chorus of Republican allies, who echoed and amplified his untruths on the campaign trail, on conservative television and in state capitols in key battlegrounds.In the days following the election, his rhetoric defied logic as he cited more and more outlandish accusations and echoed unverified Twitter accounts. “They are finding Biden votes all over the place — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan,” Trump tweeted on Nov. 4, suggesting falsely that ballots still being counted a day after the election were fraudulent. “So bad for our Country!”On Nov. 30, the president retweeted an account named @Catturd2 that claimed in Arizona, “Truck Loads of Ballots Kept Coming in For 10 Days After Elections Officials Thought They Were Done Counting.”Many of his increasingly outrageous accusations — blasted out to his 89 million followers on Twitter — came straight from one of his new favorite news sources, One America News.“Pennsylvania Poll Watcher: USB Drives uploaded to machines, gave Biden thousands of votes,” the president tweeted on Nov. 27.Dec. 16: “Study: Dominion Machines shifted 2-3% of Trump Votes to Biden. Far more votes than needed to sway election.”Cobb County election workers recount votes by hand in Marietta, Ga. (Kevin D. Liles/for The Washington Post)Trump and his allies also claimed to have scores of “affidavits” alleging fraud on a massive scale. But the sworn statements his campaign and his allies submitted in lawsuits contained meaningless observations, such as one complaint in Michigan that a “man of intimidating size” had followed a poll watcher too closely, and another who said that a public address system was too loud and therefore “distracting to those of us trying to concentrate.”Trump and his allies have lost overwhelmingly when they tried to overturn Biden’s victory through the courts, with at least 88 judges across the country ruling against them either on procedural grounds or on the merits in more than 50 cases. The president’s campaign on Sunday said it was filing a new petition with the Supreme Court seeking to overturn the result in Pennsylvania, challenging state voting procedures similar to those that the court has so far declined to act on.Even as his accusations havecollapsed under scrutiny, they have gained traction among his most ardent supporters.They have been spurred on by Trump-supporting cable and online news outlets such as OAN and Newsmax, which touted unfounded theories about the Dominion machines, dead people voting and poll workers in Michigan allegedly covering up windows with cardboard to prevent observers from watching the process.At a rally in Valdosta, Ga., earlier this month for two Republican senators facing a runoff election on Jan. 5, Trump paused his speech and turned to giant screens that played misleading news reports on fraud. Thousands in the crowd watched the videos, rapt.Trump supporters chant at a rally in Valdosta, Ga. in early December. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)Trump’s arguments made sense, his supporters said. They couldn’t believe that Biden fared better than Obama had in his races, and they were suspicious that Trump was ahead in some states on Election Day but fell behind as mail ballots were counted — either unaware or untrusting of news reports explaining why that was expected.“Do you truly believe that Joe Biden got more votes than Barack Obama?” asked Wendy Mick, 53, who traveled from New Jersey to a “Stop the Steal” rally in the District on Dec. 12, and said that Newsmax and OAN are her new preferred sources for political news. “He never campaigned. There’s no way that Biden got so many votes.”How the lie took holdThe relative silence of Republicans lawmakers in the initial days after the election, both in states and on Capitol Hill, quickly gave way to a flood of support for Trump’s posture.A stock line emerged among Republican leaders who refused to acknowledge Biden’s win: The president has the right to pursue all legal avenues available to him.But Trump has done more than pursue all legal avenues. He has openly cajoled his supporters to join the fight. And they did.In Maricopa County, Ariz., home of Phoenix, his supporters lashed out at local election officials, accusing them without evidence of improperly verifying signatures, switching Trump votes to Biden votes on duplicate ballots and keeping observers too far away from ballot-counting to see anything.In Wisconsin, they claimed the use of drop boxes for mail ballots was illegal. With most municipal offices closed to the public because of the pandemic, many city clerks set up secure drop boxes not just for ballots, but for other city business such as utility bills.“I had customers dropping off absentee ballots and saying, ‘How are you going to differentiate my ballot from a utility bill?’ and I thought, ‘Wow, you must really think I’m dumb that I can’t differentiate a ballot envelope from a utility bill,’ ” said Lori Stottler, the city clerk in Beloit, Wis., on the Illinois border. “But then I thought, ‘Well, they don’t know what I do.’ And I took a step back and I tried to explain.”GOP Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler’s Facebook page was inundated with demands from constituents that he reverse Biden’s win in the state. Protesters also gathered outside his rural home in Lancaster County on Dec. 5 with bullhorns and signs.“Petition your governor for a special session!” an organizer shouted. “Why haven’t you petitioned him?”“Do your job!” the crowd chanted back. “Do your job! Do your job!”Trump supporters pray and sing outside the Capitol in Harrisburg, Pa., on Dec. 14, as the state’s electors cast their ballots for Biden. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)At one point, Rep. Seth Grove, a Republican lawmaker from York County, Pa., said a conservative activist confronted him at the Capitol in Harrisburg, demanding that the legislature take action to seat Trump’s electors — even though state law does not allow such a move.Grove said he was stunned when the longtime tea party organizer proclaimed, “You know, the Constitution doesn’t limit government!”It was a reminder, Grove said, of just how much power Trump has amassed over the Republican electorate, to the point that some of his supporters are no longer guided by political principles they have claimed adherence to in the past.“I looked at him. I’m like, ‘What?’ ” Grove recalled. “It shocked me. Shocked me.”Lawmakers in Arizona and Pennsylvania rebuffed the president’s efforts to stage official hearings to examine potential fraud. But back benchers in both states assembled media spectacles in hotel ballrooms, labeling them hearings but presenting “witnesses” that were not under oath and offering no evidence for their claims.Republican lawmakers in Michigan and Georgia did hold official hearings, giving Giuliani an additional platform to unspool a series of false claims.“I know they are under a lot of pressure from their base, from the lies being spun by Trump and his enablers, right-wing media, etc., but it was really disappointing,” said Parent, the Georgia senator. “The hearing was obviously a sham that wasn’t designed to answer any questions about the election.”Republicans on the committee did not respond to requests for comment.One witness at the Michigan hearing, Mellissa Carone, gained notoriety for a stream of unfounded accusations, including one claim that she’d seen a van pull up to a Detroit vote-counting center that was meant to bring in meals for election workers but was actually filled with phony ballots. Carone had previously been deemed “simply not credible” by a state judge.Trump lashed out at those who refused to bend to his will. He called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, an “enemy of the people” for failing to embrace the president’s accusations of fraud. He accused the Michigan secretary of state, Democrat Jocelyn Benson, of “breaking the law” by rigging voting machines.Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks at a news conference in Atlanta. (Kevin D. Liles/for The Washington Post)And he threatened Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, also a Republican, with a primary challenge in 2022 for not helping him reverse the outcome — even though Kemp had explained in a contentious phone call that he did not have the power to do so.Trump’s rhetoric has spurred some of his supporters to do more than merely protest.Raffensperger and his wife began receiving death threats and accepted a state security detail at their home in suburban Atlanta. Protesters trespassed at Benson’s home in Detroit, some armed with bullhorns and some with guns, ignoring neighbors’ pleas to go home because they were scaring children, including Benson’s 4-year-old son.In Houston, a former police captain was arrested Tuesday after allegedly slamming into an air-conditioning repairman’s truck to thwart what he said was a vast election-fraud scheme. The man, Mark Anthony Aguirre, was paid $250,000 by a right-wing organization to pursue fraud conspiracy theories and believed that the truck contained 750,000 fake ballots, police said.The truck, it turned out, was full of nothing but air conditioning parts.'The fraud happened'Vanishingly few national Republicans have been willing to stand up to the false statements, despite privately acknowledging that the election is over. “The future will take care of itself,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters in early December, refusing to acknowledge that Biden had won.In Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers who had initially resisted the president’s entreaties wound up signing onto an emergency petition to the Supreme Court that sought to overturn Biden’s win in the state, though they never cited fraud in their filing. They also sent a letter to Congress urging federal lawmakers to reject Pennsylvania’s electoral votes when they convene on Jan. 6.Grove, the GOP lawmaker from Pennsylvania, said he and other Republicans had assumed the letter would go nowhere. A challenge requires support from a member of both the House and Senate, but Grove and others incorrectly thought they had to be from the state in question, and they knew that Pennsylvania’s two senators, Republican Patrick J. Toomey and Democrat Robert P. Casey Jr., would not support it.“We didn’t know that anyone can do it from any state,” Grove said. “That was a surprise.”Congressional Republicans also began echoing Trump’s claims; 126 of them ultimately signed onto an emergency petition to the Supreme Court seeking to overturn results in four states Biden had won.“The fraud happened,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) at a hearing last week in Washington to examine election irregularities.Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who called the hearing despite acknowledgingthat Biden had won a legitimate election following the electoral college vote, declared at the start of the proceeding: “There was fraud in this election. I don’t have any doubt about that.”That idea that something went wrong with the vote this year has now taken hold among many Americans.Anna Van Winkle, a retired aesthetician in Savannah, Ga., who voted for Trump, has accepted her candidate’s defeat, but believes lawmakers must fix the election process to make sure such broad doubt in the outcome can’t happen again.“My concern is that we don’t go down this road again,” she said. “We had a problem. We had a big problem. And now, going forward, the best way to deal with this is to fix this where somebody like me is not going to wonder, ‘Okay, was there fraud here?’”Van Winkle was perplexed when she received multiple absentee ballot request forms at her address, and worries that others willing to commit ballot fraud would have been able to do so by requesting more than one ballot. Although Georgia requires identification to request a ballot online — and signature matching on ballots themselves — Van Winkle doesn’t understand why states don’t require mail voters to get their ballots notarized.Clayton County election workers recount votes in Jonesboro, Ga. (Kevin D. Liles/for The Washington Post)Voting-right activists, meanwhile, are concerned that such sentiments will now be cited as an excuse to try to erect new barriers to casting ballots.Indeed, GOP lawmakers in Georgia have already floated a proposal to eliminate no-excuses absentee balloting, meaning only those with a qualifying reason such as illness or an overseas assignment could vote by mail. In Texas, lawmakers have filed bills to limit distribution of absentee ballot applications and make it a felony to help voters fill out ballots. Pennsylvania Republicans have discussed tighter identification requirements for mail ballots and signature matches.Defenders of this year’s elections also recognize the need to shore up public confidence. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who advocated unsuccessfully for billions in election aid for states this year, believes Congress must act to curtail misinformation on social media companies, which she said fell short in their civic obligation to restrict false claims on their platforms.Klobuchar said she was heartened by the Republicans who immediately acknowledged Biden’s win, by those who did so after the electoral college vote and by the dozens of judges across the country, many of them Republican appointees, who roundly rejected the fraud claims of Trump and his allies.“All of those things mean our democracy is working during a really hard time,” she said.But there remains the reality that Trump and millions of his supporters still refuse to accept Biden’s win, creating a disturbing precedent, Klobuchar said, in a political system that has prided itself on the peaceful transfer of power and acknowledgment of election results.“I’m concerned about our democracy in the long run if these civil mores change,” she said, “so people don’t even have to tell the truth about who won.”Emma Brown, Robert Barnes, Emily Guskin, Rosalind S. Helderman, Elise Viebeck and Rachel Weiner contributed to this report.