Trump’s bad evidence of his alleged legal persecution

One of the biggest stories of our modern politics is former president Donald Trump’s ability to make his base and his political party come along for the ride despite making transparently bad, false and even ridiculous arguments.

The most pronounced example, of course, is his claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Trump relied on bogus claims of hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes, oodles of dead voters, complete mischaracterizations of the vote-counting process and the like. Republicans generally didn’t echo the specific claims — apparently because they couldn’t or didn’t want to vouch for them — but they broadly toed Trump’s line on the election being suspect.