Arnold wrote: "I should note that Mike Pence, the Republican who served as VP under President Trump, is quite angry with the demonstrators and with Trump." Pence is too simple-minded. There were four groups involved in January 6: 1) honest Trump-supporting legitimate protestors who did nothing wrong (the overwhelming majority; 2) a handful of disorderly Trump supporters; 3) Antifa radicals masquerading as Trump supporters to bring obloquy on them (as they had done at 2016 Trump campaign rallies); and 4) government undercover agents, some of them disguised as Trump supporters, who encouraged and facilitated the disorder.
Unfortunately, the many legitimate protestors have been tarred with the brush of the disorders, thus obscuring that there are reasonable concerns about the integrity of the election, and smearing those who have them.
Some of group 1 appear to have been entrapped into entering the Capitol through encouragement and facilitation by government agents.
Totally agree with Scott Atlas that society needs to be told the harsh truth in the starkest possible terms. American society is living a multilayered cake of lies and it is dying as a consequence.
My 2 cents on "stolen elections" is the harsh truth is American elections are easily manipulated and government/ political parties are resistant to changes that would improve voting integrity. The consequence is political parties are in a race to optimize voting manipulations. The result is diminishing confidence in election results.
I'll add that one of the freshly baked lies we have in America is that a filled out ballot invariably reflects the distinct will of a legal, interested voter. The system only assumes that is the case.
Ballot harvesting is a good example. On election day last November, a woman showed up by mistake at the door of my new home in Nevada, where I had recently moved to be closer to family in my home state of CA, without having to put up with the high taxes and other nonsense that have ruined that state. A Berkeley-trained lawyer from a liberal Bay Area enclave, she and her husband had braved bad weather (rain in CA, snow where I live) to drive over the mountains to help get out the vote in Nevada. Would you do that? Turns out the Nevada legislature had recently legalized ballot harvesting. You can try all you want to be even-handed about the narratives of both parties, but the truth is that for those of us who just want to be left alone, there is no escape from the lunatics.
The Twitter Files have demonstrated that various bureaucracies within the US federal government were successfully coercively pressuring the major social media tech platforms like Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube, Medium, Wikipedia, and Pinterest to manipulate public opinion on COVID and on the 2020 election. Stories unfavorable to Trump, even false stories about collusion with Russian and Putin were amplified and given credibility via federal government actions. Stories unfavorable to Biden had their circulation drastically reduced via federal government action. Some said this wasn't strict censorship, because determined members of the public could still find and read the stories, but large numbers of the public wouldn't hear about them, and their impact on broad public perception and broad voting behaviors would be reduced.
Is this fair play or is this cheating? It's quite reasonable to say that controlling all the major news and media platforms had a large impact on the 2020 election, and given as close as the election was, it's reasonable to say that without these dirty tricks, Trump would have won 2020.
Arnold Kling, would you agree that the federal government was coercively pressuring all major media and tech platforms to manipulate public opinion on the 2020 election? Would you consider this fair play or cheating or somewhere in between? If this was cheating, and if we accept for arguments sake that this did have a significant impact on voting behavior, and Trump would have won without cheating, is it a "stolen election"? Would you prefer some different semantics or phrasing?
My guess is that Kling wouldn't defend the tactics used, he wouldn't say it was a reasonably fair election, but he doesn't have sympathy for the Trump crowd, and isn't willing to hear them complain about it.
I'm not sure I understand your question. To me, the definition of a stolen election is one in which X won the actual vote but Y won the election because of fraudulent ballots, false vote counts, or some such. 1960 was plausibly a stolen election.
Media manipulation is something to complain about, but it's a different complaint. In principle, you could prove a stolen-election claim if you could identify the fraudulent votes and miscounts and correct for those. I don't see how you can prove a claim that media manipulation caused a specific number of voters to vote differently.
Arnold, you're disputing semantics. By the definition of "stealing an election" you just declared, I would agree with you; that didn't happen. But you can't just unitlaterally choose your own word definitions and expect the entire world to recognize them. Using definitions offered by mainstream dictionaries like, for example, Merriam-Webster, then "stealing the election" is a valid claim. There was significant, demonstrable underhanded behavior that impacted the election. That was cheating. By mainstream language definitions, the label "stolen election" is reasonable.
It seems like you object to the blunt, inflammatory rhetoric more than the content of the claim. You don't object to what Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald is writing on Twitter, but compacting it into an inflammatory rhetorical slogan "stolen election", and you object.
History is full of dirty deeds, life needs to move on, and this is no exception. I am or was a Trump mega-fan, I've moved on. But, you are saying that claims of a stolen election are untrue, and that's just wrong.
More than any other Kling post, I found it lacked context for me to recognize what much of it was about. So far I've only verified what I guessed Naomi Wolf was referring to. Glad I did. While I knew much of the event was peaceful and the police officer didn't die of his wounds from being attacked (and all but one civilian died of causes unrelated to the event), it was interesting to see how different this video footage is from what we've previously seen. If you haven't seen Carlson's piece, here it is.
Well, if Naomi Wolf found a Tucker Carlson segment convincing, that's enough for me.
To heck with the months of testimony confirming "the narrative" of what occurred that day (I like to think that facts can exist outside of a subjective narrative, but on these topics this publication retreats to that post-modern position of BS for some reason). Just put this one in the hopper with every other news story you don't want to think too deeply about and move on.
We have Naomi Wolf, a woman whose thinking is held in disdain precisely for her inability to understand or critically evaluate sources, being taken in by an abject charlatan we all should despise.
The reaction? These are the kinds of leftists we need! <approving quote and link>
“[F]or many people, empathy is very close to morality.” Well, it underlies the soft side of morality. But there is also a hard or sharp side--the punitive aspect, in which transgressions of the social rules are punished—underlain by righteous anger.
Torenberg (and Nietzsche) misrepresents Christianity. Rather than invert the Master/Slave dynamic, it tends toward erasing it, with a universalizing theology that all are Gods children and equally valuable. Case in point, Classical society was built on slavery, Christian society freed the slaves. This didn’t result in less meritocracy or achievement, but more - opening up education government and professional activities to all classes, races, genders. The grand achievements of the Christian West that we all benefit from attest to this.
On the other hand the term Slave morality may be a fair characterization of the left’s victimhood ideology - it tends to magnify divisions and lionize victims real and imaginary. But that is different from real Christianity, and has arisen as Christianity itself recedes from the picture.
Catholic Papal Bulls against slavery started in the 1400s, including one in 1435 that demanded that some recently enslaved people in the Canary Islands be freed. It took time, but legal abolition happened in the independent republic of Vermont in 1777, Danish colonies in 1803, Spain 1811, Sweden 1813, Britain 1833, etc. The abolition societies behind this social movement were Christian religious groups.
The pre-industrial world was one in which anything other they subsistence misery required violence, directly or by proxy.
The classical world was stuck in a rut where this engaged in a cycle described by C.S. Lewis in "On Chivalry". No progress could be made.
Eventually some of the principles in Christianity allowed less violent positive sum thinking to have enough status and protection that we got the Industrial Revolution and escaped that trap.
However, while giving rights to the 95% of people that would have been right-less in the pre-modern world had huge ROI, giving extensive positive rights to the perpetually doomed "true underclass/lumpenproleteriate" was a total dead end as well. A perversion of the liberal trend. Even Marx and St Paul recognized this.
I would agree with Arnold's having had it with narratives. It seems that our media have mostly become nothing but narrative engineers. But concerns about the integrity of the election are well founded, given how little it takes to swing the electoral college by relatively small manipulations in a few key cities, where the vote counting process was highly dubious, plus the whole atmosphere of manipulation described in Molly Ball's (in)famous Time article. https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
So I would not classify these concerns as a mere "narrative" that should be dropped.
To a first approximation Torenberg is wrong and de Waal is ready right. The "naturalness" of Master morality is a theory my story divorced from observation. "Slave" morality is just a Nietscherian slur for what should just be called "human" morality.
But at the second approximation, marauding and bullying sometimes work. They work often enough that we have well adapted cognitive machinery for exploiting and coping with the fact. That machinery runs deep enough that Homer could write literary masterpieces about it.
There's an interesting schizophrenia with the victimhood morality these days. On the one hand, they valorize victims and victimhood, but at the same time they take a scorched-earth approach toward those they don't like (e.g., Republicans), being more than willing to destroy them by any means necessary.
Narratives: The "stolen election" is simple enough to just "drop."
There are many different Democratic narratives of 1/6, so which should be dropped?
Fauci was the public face of many many incorrect, misleading messages (mainly, but not exclusively by not keeping the message up to date with the changing disease prevalence and vaccine status but more fundamentally because the messages were about what to DO rather than giving people the information they needed to decide for them selves what the most cost effective things to do were). But a lot of dissent WAS misinformation.
We can talk about all of those things, but they don't add up to a "stolen" election, so THAT is what one could drop.
And we can drop "insurrection," so long as it remains clear that it was an attempt, encouraged by the ex-President himself, to prevent the transfer of power to a new administration.
I don't have a clue if the election was stolen or not, I only know it doesn't matter. If you steal an election and nobody stops you, the losing party doesn't have a right to complain.
I don't think that many of the Jan 6th people had a clue what they were doing or what their plan was. I also suspect that a lot of it wasn't that attached to the election per se, I'm guessing a lot of it was related to COVID/BLM. I personally wouldn't have minded if the legislators had been killed not because I have an opinion on the election but because I felt what they did during COVID was fundamentally un-American and deserved retribution.
Hmm. Blaming Congress for the weird combination of under-, over- and mis-reaction to COVID never occurred to me. I (making up numbers) put it 60% on CDC for not providing citizens and local policymakers with the information THEY needed to decide on cost effective anti-spread policies and behaviors, 10% on the media for not calling CDC out on this failing, 10% on citizens and local policy makers for not demanding the information, and 20% on DFA for not approving the vaccines quicker and not permitting/encouraging screening testing early in the pandemic to reduce the costs anti-spread policies. Yes, Congress could have jumped in there and Trump could not have been an AO, but these were minor compared to the other factors, IMO.
There were also the stories about people showing up at the polls, only to be told they had already voted, and given the consolation prize of a provisional ballot. My former neighbor in the DC area told me this happened to a Republican-registered friend in Virginia during the 2020 election. Perhaps the original idea behind some of these tactics was to skim off a few votes here and there at the front end, and thus avoid having to resort to 'irregularities' in vote counting and ballot processing at the back end. But it didn't always work, and at this point some precincts don't seem to bother even making a pretense of election integrity. That is what J6 was about -- the jail sentences given to those who participated in the 'insurrection' send a loud and clear message about the consequences of questioning the results of future elections.
To reinforce Thomas L. Hutcheson's observation that irregularities don't add up to a stolen election, consider these points:
(1) No court found any litigation filed with it immediately after the 2020 election claiming fraud sufficiently convincing to issue a preliminary injunction. See the American Bar Association's summary here, in the section of the page on "Fraud and Vote Dilution": https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/election_law/litigation/
(2) A group of nationally prominent conservatives reviewed evidence on the presidential election. The title of the Web site that contains their report summarizes their findings: https://lostnotstolen.org/
Countries that are considerably poorer than the United States hold more transparent elections. One thing that helps them is that they have national identification cards, which make it easy to check whether somebody's credentials have been used to vote more than once. Even so, the United States is wealthy enough that it would be possible to achieve a similar level of transparency without an national identification card if state legislators wanted to do it. They have shown that in many instances they do not.
Arnold wrote: "I should note that Mike Pence, the Republican who served as VP under President Trump, is quite angry with the demonstrators and with Trump." Pence is too simple-minded. There were four groups involved in January 6: 1) honest Trump-supporting legitimate protestors who did nothing wrong (the overwhelming majority; 2) a handful of disorderly Trump supporters; 3) Antifa radicals masquerading as Trump supporters to bring obloquy on them (as they had done at 2016 Trump campaign rallies); and 4) government undercover agents, some of them disguised as Trump supporters, who encouraged and facilitated the disorder.
Unfortunately, the many legitimate protestors have been tarred with the brush of the disorders, thus obscuring that there are reasonable concerns about the integrity of the election, and smearing those who have them.
Some of group 1 appear to have been entrapped into entering the Capitol through encouragement and facilitation by government agents.
Quite incredible! This should be headline news….but doesn’t follow the narrative.
Totally agree with Scott Atlas that society needs to be told the harsh truth in the starkest possible terms. American society is living a multilayered cake of lies and it is dying as a consequence.
My 2 cents on "stolen elections" is the harsh truth is American elections are easily manipulated and government/ political parties are resistant to changes that would improve voting integrity. The consequence is political parties are in a race to optimize voting manipulations. The result is diminishing confidence in election results.
I'll add that one of the freshly baked lies we have in America is that a filled out ballot invariably reflects the distinct will of a legal, interested voter. The system only assumes that is the case.
Ballot harvesting is a good example. On election day last November, a woman showed up by mistake at the door of my new home in Nevada, where I had recently moved to be closer to family in my home state of CA, without having to put up with the high taxes and other nonsense that have ruined that state. A Berkeley-trained lawyer from a liberal Bay Area enclave, she and her husband had braved bad weather (rain in CA, snow where I live) to drive over the mountains to help get out the vote in Nevada. Would you do that? Turns out the Nevada legislature had recently legalized ballot harvesting. You can try all you want to be even-handed about the narratives of both parties, but the truth is that for those of us who just want to be left alone, there is no escape from the lunatics.
The claim that most adults make friends via their employer strikes me as incorrect. At least as far as my experience is concerned.
Some people want their work to be their life. Others want work to be a paycheck so they can get back to their real life.
I was always taught that having a personal life at work was unprofessional.
People at work are forced to deal with you (and you then). These are not friendships of choice like real friendships.
I feel like my perspective has lost ground. I think because people are childless more of threat lives.
The Twitter Files have demonstrated that various bureaucracies within the US federal government were successfully coercively pressuring the major social media tech platforms like Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube, Medium, Wikipedia, and Pinterest to manipulate public opinion on COVID and on the 2020 election. Stories unfavorable to Trump, even false stories about collusion with Russian and Putin were amplified and given credibility via federal government actions. Stories unfavorable to Biden had their circulation drastically reduced via federal government action. Some said this wasn't strict censorship, because determined members of the public could still find and read the stories, but large numbers of the public wouldn't hear about them, and their impact on broad public perception and broad voting behaviors would be reduced.
Is this fair play or is this cheating? It's quite reasonable to say that controlling all the major news and media platforms had a large impact on the 2020 election, and given as close as the election was, it's reasonable to say that without these dirty tricks, Trump would have won 2020.
Arnold Kling, would you agree that the federal government was coercively pressuring all major media and tech platforms to manipulate public opinion on the 2020 election? Would you consider this fair play or cheating or somewhere in between? If this was cheating, and if we accept for arguments sake that this did have a significant impact on voting behavior, and Trump would have won without cheating, is it a "stolen election"? Would you prefer some different semantics or phrasing?
My guess is that Kling wouldn't defend the tactics used, he wouldn't say it was a reasonably fair election, but he doesn't have sympathy for the Trump crowd, and isn't willing to hear them complain about it.
I'm not sure I understand your question. To me, the definition of a stolen election is one in which X won the actual vote but Y won the election because of fraudulent ballots, false vote counts, or some such. 1960 was plausibly a stolen election.
Media manipulation is something to complain about, but it's a different complaint. In principle, you could prove a stolen-election claim if you could identify the fraudulent votes and miscounts and correct for those. I don't see how you can prove a claim that media manipulation caused a specific number of voters to vote differently.
Arnold, you're disputing semantics. By the definition of "stealing an election" you just declared, I would agree with you; that didn't happen. But you can't just unitlaterally choose your own word definitions and expect the entire world to recognize them. Using definitions offered by mainstream dictionaries like, for example, Merriam-Webster, then "stealing the election" is a valid claim. There was significant, demonstrable underhanded behavior that impacted the election. That was cheating. By mainstream language definitions, the label "stolen election" is reasonable.
It seems like you object to the blunt, inflammatory rhetoric more than the content of the claim. You don't object to what Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald is writing on Twitter, but compacting it into an inflammatory rhetorical slogan "stolen election", and you object.
History is full of dirty deeds, life needs to move on, and this is no exception. I am or was a Trump mega-fan, I've moved on. But, you are saying that claims of a stolen election are untrue, and that's just wrong.
More than any other Kling post, I found it lacked context for me to recognize what much of it was about. So far I've only verified what I guessed Naomi Wolf was referring to. Glad I did. While I knew much of the event was peaceful and the police officer didn't die of his wounds from being attacked (and all but one civilian died of causes unrelated to the event), it was interesting to see how different this video footage is from what we've previously seen. If you haven't seen Carlson's piece, here it is.
https://youtu.be/Opy7MLGAPBk
Too bad it's a bit tarnished by Carlson destroying his debatable reputation by lying on air about how he really feels about Trump.
It also increases my doubts that suicides by officers present were indeed related to this event and not coincidence.
Well, if Naomi Wolf found a Tucker Carlson segment convincing, that's enough for me.
To heck with the months of testimony confirming "the narrative" of what occurred that day (I like to think that facts can exist outside of a subjective narrative, but on these topics this publication retreats to that post-modern position of BS for some reason). Just put this one in the hopper with every other news story you don't want to think too deeply about and move on.
I still can't get past this.
We have Naomi Wolf, a woman whose thinking is held in disdain precisely for her inability to understand or critically evaluate sources, being taken in by an abject charlatan we all should despise.
The reaction? These are the kinds of leftists we need! <approving quote and link>
Jesus how pathetic
“[F]or many people, empathy is very close to morality.” Well, it underlies the soft side of morality. But there is also a hard or sharp side--the punitive aspect, in which transgressions of the social rules are punished—underlain by righteous anger.
Torenberg (and Nietzsche) misrepresents Christianity. Rather than invert the Master/Slave dynamic, it tends toward erasing it, with a universalizing theology that all are Gods children and equally valuable. Case in point, Classical society was built on slavery, Christian society freed the slaves. This didn’t result in less meritocracy or achievement, but more - opening up education government and professional activities to all classes, races, genders. The grand achievements of the Christian West that we all benefit from attest to this.
On the other hand the term Slave morality may be a fair characterization of the left’s victimhood ideology - it tends to magnify divisions and lionize victims real and imaginary. But that is different from real Christianity, and has arisen as Christianity itself recedes from the picture.
> Christian society freed the slaves.
When?
Catholic Papal Bulls against slavery started in the 1400s, including one in 1435 that demanded that some recently enslaved people in the Canary Islands be freed. It took time, but legal abolition happened in the independent republic of Vermont in 1777, Danish colonies in 1803, Spain 1811, Sweden 1813, Britain 1833, etc. The abolition societies behind this social movement were Christian religious groups.
Reformation significantly delayed abolition by decentralizing the moral decision-making on that matter.
The pre-industrial world was one in which anything other they subsistence misery required violence, directly or by proxy.
The classical world was stuck in a rut where this engaged in a cycle described by C.S. Lewis in "On Chivalry". No progress could be made.
Eventually some of the principles in Christianity allowed less violent positive sum thinking to have enough status and protection that we got the Industrial Revolution and escaped that trap.
However, while giving rights to the 95% of people that would have been right-less in the pre-modern world had huge ROI, giving extensive positive rights to the perpetually doomed "true underclass/lumpenproleteriate" was a total dead end as well. A perversion of the liberal trend. Even Marx and St Paul recognized this.
I would agree with Arnold's having had it with narratives. It seems that our media have mostly become nothing but narrative engineers. But concerns about the integrity of the election are well founded, given how little it takes to swing the electoral college by relatively small manipulations in a few key cities, where the vote counting process was highly dubious, plus the whole atmosphere of manipulation described in Molly Ball's (in)famous Time article. https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
So I would not classify these concerns as a mere "narrative" that should be dropped.
To a first approximation Torenberg is wrong and de Waal is ready right. The "naturalness" of Master morality is a theory my story divorced from observation. "Slave" morality is just a Nietscherian slur for what should just be called "human" morality.
But at the second approximation, marauding and bullying sometimes work. They work often enough that we have well adapted cognitive machinery for exploiting and coping with the fact. That machinery runs deep enough that Homer could write literary masterpieces about it.
"Lorenzo Warby on conspiracism"
I didn't see any link or description in the post. If added later, please feel free to delete this comment.
I was going to link to this post (https://helendale.substack.com/p/just-dont-go-there) but changed my mind. I can't remember why. I might link to it some other time.
There's an interesting schizophrenia with the victimhood morality these days. On the one hand, they valorize victims and victimhood, but at the same time they take a scorched-earth approach toward those they don't like (e.g., Republicans), being more than willing to destroy them by any means necessary.
Narratives: The "stolen election" is simple enough to just "drop."
There are many different Democratic narratives of 1/6, so which should be dropped?
Fauci was the public face of many many incorrect, misleading messages (mainly, but not exclusively by not keeping the message up to date with the changing disease prevalence and vaccine status but more fundamentally because the messages were about what to DO rather than giving people the information they needed to decide for them selves what the most cost effective things to do were). But a lot of dissent WAS misinformation.
Not as simple as "dropping" a narrative.
What does it mean to drop the narrative of the "stolen election", exactly?
Can we still talk about private funding of election offices (Zucker-bucks)?
How about the use of mail-in and absentee ballots, and ballot drop-boxes, and the controls on the same?
What about irregularities in vote counting and ballot processing?
The use of electronic voting machines with no paper audit trail?
Voter registration and identification?
There's nothing simple about the narrative of the "stolen election" unless you ignore all of the specific controversies.
I can say the Democrat insistence that J6 was an 'insurrection' is a plenty simple enough narrative to just drop, as well.
We can talk about all of those things, but they don't add up to a "stolen" election, so THAT is what one could drop.
And we can drop "insurrection," so long as it remains clear that it was an attempt, encouraged by the ex-President himself, to prevent the transfer of power to a new administration.
I don't have a clue if the election was stolen or not, I only know it doesn't matter. If you steal an election and nobody stops you, the losing party doesn't have a right to complain.
I don't think that many of the Jan 6th people had a clue what they were doing or what their plan was. I also suspect that a lot of it wasn't that attached to the election per se, I'm guessing a lot of it was related to COVID/BLM. I personally wouldn't have minded if the legislators had been killed not because I have an opinion on the election but because I felt what they did during COVID was fundamentally un-American and deserved retribution.
Hmm. Blaming Congress for the weird combination of under-, over- and mis-reaction to COVID never occurred to me. I (making up numbers) put it 60% on CDC for not providing citizens and local policymakers with the information THEY needed to decide on cost effective anti-spread policies and behaviors, 10% on the media for not calling CDC out on this failing, 10% on citizens and local policy makers for not demanding the information, and 20% on DFA for not approving the vaccines quicker and not permitting/encouraging screening testing early in the pandemic to reduce the costs anti-spread policies. Yes, Congress could have jumped in there and Trump could not have been an AO, but these were minor compared to the other factors, IMO.
There were also the stories about people showing up at the polls, only to be told they had already voted, and given the consolation prize of a provisional ballot. My former neighbor in the DC area told me this happened to a Republican-registered friend in Virginia during the 2020 election. Perhaps the original idea behind some of these tactics was to skim off a few votes here and there at the front end, and thus avoid having to resort to 'irregularities' in vote counting and ballot processing at the back end. But it didn't always work, and at this point some precincts don't seem to bother even making a pretense of election integrity. That is what J6 was about -- the jail sentences given to those who participated in the 'insurrection' send a loud and clear message about the consequences of questioning the results of future elections.
Or at least "questioning" them by storming the US Capital. :)
To reinforce Thomas L. Hutcheson's observation that irregularities don't add up to a stolen election, consider these points:
(1) No court found any litigation filed with it immediately after the 2020 election claiming fraud sufficiently convincing to issue a preliminary injunction. See the American Bar Association's summary here, in the section of the page on "Fraud and Vote Dilution": https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/election_law/litigation/
(2) A group of nationally prominent conservatives reviewed evidence on the presidential election. The title of the Web site that contains their report summarizes their findings: https://lostnotstolen.org/
(3) The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty issued a report similarly rebutting claims of a stolen election in Wisconsin, which Trump narrowly won in 2016 and narrowly lost in 2020: https://will-law.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/2021ReviewStudy.pdf
(4) The Trump campaign commissioned a research firm to report on Trump's claims of fraud but never released the report "because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election": https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/11/trump-campaign-report-electoral-fraud/ and https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2023/03/17/trump-fraud-report-2020/
(5) Since World War II, when a sitting president has not run, or has lost the election, his party has lost seats "down ballot." It happened to Trump, but to a lesser extent than to his predecessors. Had inflation fraud been widespread, presumably its perpetrators would have wanted to prevent other Republicans, not just Trump, from winning: https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/like-his-predecessors-trump-suffered-down-ballot-losses-but-the-declines-were-comparatively-modest/
Countries that are considerably poorer than the United States hold more transparent elections. One thing that helps them is that they have national identification cards, which make it easy to check whether somebody's credentials have been used to vote more than once. Even so, the United States is wealthy enough that it would be possible to achieve a similar level of transparency without an national identification card if state legislators wanted to do it. They have shown that in many instances they do not.