How Trump's judges stuck a pin in the "stop the steal" balloon

Not a single Trump appointee on any court voted to support his fraud claims.

This clear repudiation had powerful effects. It forced several of Trump’s most high-ranking supporters to finally admit that the election had not, in fact, been stolen. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had for weeks refused to acknowledge Biden’s win. He referred to him as “President-elect” only after state electors officially voted, which followed the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear a Trump challenge. Even William Barr, Trump’s sycophantic head of the Justice Department, finally admitted in early December, after election challenges were rejected en masse, that there was no evidence of widespread fraud. Reversals like these further delegitimized the “Stop the Steal” movement and threw cold water on pro-Trump groups ready to act on his incendiary claims. (According to the FBI, right-wing militias planned armed protests in all 50 state capitols. They never materialized.)

While many Trump supporters still believe he won the election—according to a January survey, over 70 percent of Republicans believed Trump received more votes than Biden—when confronted with the fact that even Trump-appointed justices rejected the fraud claims, their charges of a Democratic conspiracy became much harder to sell. Two unconvincing explanations landed in my newsfeed: one was that the courts were “mired in the Deep State;” the other was that the judges had been “paid off.” These are ridiculous, of course. Trump-appointed justices could hardly have been more scathing or thorough in their rebukes.