Maddow Blog | On election results, Republicans eagerly embrace ‘truthiness’

Nearly a month ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson held a joint press conference with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and the two Republicans touted a new proposal to crack down on non-citizen voting. It was a difficult pitch to take seriously, though as Reuters reported, it nevertheless set the stage for a legislative rollout out on Capitol Hill yesterday.

At this point, we could focus on the fact that it remains utterly ridiculous for two notorious election deniers to surround themselves with other notorious election deniers, while pretending they’re deeply concerned with the integrity of elections. We could also note NBC News’ report, which emphasized the fact that “multiple studies have shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare in federal elections.”

We could even spend some time focusing on the curious fact that GOP leaders are pushing legislation to make something illegal that is already illegal.

But it was something the Republican House speaker said during his Capitol Hill press conference yesterday that stood out as especially interesting.

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” Johnson said with a straight face, adding that his and his party’s assertions are not “easily provable.”

In other words, Republicans don’t know if their claims about this elections scourge are true, but the GOP officials assume they’re right based on their intuition.

Johnson’s comments came just one day after Trump spoke to an NBC affiliate in Pennsylvania and asserted that when it comes to election integrity, it’s important to “follow your heart.”

Or put another way, Americans could rely on actual vote tallies, but the presumptive GOP nominee believes it’s preferable to go with election results that your heart tells you might be true.

Stephen Colbert, in his old Comedy Central persona, coined the noun “truthiness” on the very first episode of “The Colbert Report” as a way of trying to make sense of the Bush administration’s assertions. In 2006, Merriam-Webster announced that “truthiness” was the Word of the Year, defining it as believing something “not because of supporting facts or evidence but because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be true.”

In other words, “truthiness” is all about believing what feels true, or what someone wants to be true, regardless of reality.

It’s also a phenomenon that Republicans have come to embrace with a bit too much enthusiasm.

Four years ago this month, asked about the economic recession, Trump said things would soon turn around. “I feel it,” the then-president said. “I think sometimes what I feel is better than what I think.”

As regular readers might recall, it was around this time when the then-president rejected the World Health Organization’s assessment on the pandemic’s fatality rates, telling Fox News, “[T]his is just my hunch.” Soon after, Trump told reporters he had “a feeling” untested medications might be effective in combating Covid. A week later, the Republican added that he had another “feeling” that state officials were wrong about their need for ventilators in hospitals to treat infected patients.

A couple of years earlier, as part of a Q&A about interest rates, Trump famously boasted, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

The Republican Party is applying this same reasoning to election results. No good can come of this.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com