There was no collusion between Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 election cycle. Trump did not collude with Russia to win that election.
We know this because there never was any evidence to support the claim. The so-called Mueller commission – in which almost every member was a registered Democrat and the other few were non-aligned – that’s right, not one Republican among them – could not come up with with any. If even an all-Democrat group can’t find the collusion, you can bet it was never there.
So why do most Democrats still believe Trump colluded with Russia in 2016?
From Miranda Devine’s article for the New York Post:
A new Rasmussen poll to be published Monday morning shows a majority of Democrats still believe the Russia collusion hoax, even though it has been debunked repeatedly.
Astonishingly, 60% of Democratic voters still think “the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election”, according to the poll of 1,014 Likely Voters conducted on July 6-7.
A whopping 69 percent of liberal voters still cling to the Russia collusion hoax, compared to 27 percent of conservatives, and 45 percent of moderates. Among all voters, more believe it unlikely (49 percent) than likely (42 percent).
The fact that liberals and Democrats still believe in the hoax is likely a reflection of their preferred media outlets, such as the New York Times, which refuses to hand back its ill-gotten Pulitzers, and MSNBC, which pays discredited plotters such as former CIA director John Brennan and former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissman to act out their Trump derangement on air.
I agree with Ms. Devine that our media – not all but a very large percentage of it – has been perfectly willing to continue floating this hoax even after it was exposed. Let’s remember that these are the same media which told us Trump called nazis “very fine people” and told us to jab bleach into our veins to cure covid – both dead-on lies.
But there’s more to this. We also have the “make them say it to others and it becomes theirs” factor.
What does that mean?
It means that if media sends up a claim – let’s talk about the Russian collusion claim – and get people to tell other people about it as if it were true – it is no longer just a media claim, it is now their claim as well. And if the claim is subsequently debunked/shown to be a hoax, it doesn’t just make the source of the claim wrong, it makes the people who believed it and stated it as a fact wrong too.
That means it becomes personal. It doesn’t just speak to the media’s credibility, it speaks to their credibility every bit as much. They don’t want to admit they bought into a hoax because they feel it makes them look bad. So they hang on to it, even after it has been debunked.
This is the power media can have over some people. And it, I am confident, is why so many Democrats still cling to the Russian collusion hoax.
