Thread by @AlexandraErin

So Ben Shapiro wants to know what the difference between Donald Trump saying the election was stolen and Stacey Abrams saying she was a victim of voter suppression is.

Donald Trump tried to coerce government officials and sent an angry mob to overturn the results.

Stacey Abrams did not do that. She acknowledged that Kemp was the winner under the system we have, and then went on to dedicate herself to the hard work of overcoming the bias built into the system in order to gain enough power to correct it.

There is also the fact that Stacey Abrams is right and Donald Trump is wrong, but for me the question Ben is asking is more about what they do. We can't fully rule out the possibility that Trump sincerely believes he's right, too.

I say we can't fully rule out that possibility but I'm not interested in verifying or falsifying it. I don't care what Trump believes. From my vantage point outside his skull, I am not convinced he believes anything.

He's both said and shown us that for him, the truth is what's good for him and things that are bad for him are fake. His net worth is how good he feels. Polls, news, job reports, facts... they're real if they help him. Fake if they don't.

He can completely contradict his own stated positions within a single conversation or speech, sometimes in the same sentence. When he does that, which version does he believe is true? The one that he's saying, when he's saying it. Because in that moment, it's good.

So does Donald Trump really think the election was stolen via massive coordinated fraud? Well, losing the election hurts. And proving that it was fraudulent would help.

Donald Trump did not start out with a bunch of hypotheses about Dominion and Smartmatic and "hammer and scorecard" and so on, which his aides validated by bringing him information.

He instead started from the position that he couldn't legitimately lose.

And so every cock-and-bull story off the internet about how Venezuela or the CIA or the Girl Scouts of America or the Blue Meanies was rigging the votes against him became true to him, because they were good and helpful for his purposes.