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After months of incessant allegations of voter fraud, fake ballots, and hacked machines, after days spent watching Fox News and Newsmax and scrolling through Facebook and Parler, 60-year-old Sandra has become convinced of one thing.
“If Trump doesn’t win, I won’t vote again,” Sandra said. “Because what good would it do? What good did it do?”
With unprecedented false claims of a stolen election, President Donald Trump incited thousands of his supporters to carry out a violent insurrection last week at the Capitol — attacking police officers, looting and robbing buildings, even building a gallows.
In the small city of Weatherford, Texas, what those claims have done to Sandra is much quieter. But for the country, and the Republican Party, it may ultimately be just as damaging. Trump and the Republicans who have echoed his lies about wide-scale election fraud have broken Sandra’s faith in almost everything: in most Republicans, in the election system, in voting, in democracy and the country itself.