Nearly one-third of GOP voters believe Trump will be 'reinstated,' new poll says
Donald Trump is not going back to the White House in August, but a large segment of the Republican base believes he is.
Nearly one-third of Republicans believe Donald Trump will be likely be “reinstated” in office in August, a new Politico/Morning Consult poll released on Wednesday found — the latest lie the GOP base believes surrounding the 2020 election.
The poll found that an overwhelming majority of voters, or 72%, say it’s “not likely at all” or “not very likely” that Trump will be reinstated. However, 17% of Republicans believe it’s “very likely” that Trump will be reinstated, while another 12% believe reinstatement is “somewhat likely.”
Trump himself has been telling advisers that he will be reinstated by August, according to a report from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman confirmed by other outlets.
The lie appears to have emanated from the QAnon conspiracy theory world, which purports that the shambolic audit of the 2020 results underway in Arizona will prove that Trump actually won the state, and will start a domino effect as GOP lawmakers in other states push for similar audits.
However, the Arizona audit will not overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results, according to which Biden carried it by more than 10,000 votes. Those results not only have already been certified, but also have been verified by three separate previous audits that found no fraud nor irregularities in the vote.
Experts say that the Arizona audit, being run by a Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist who pushed lies that the election was stolen, is being run so shoddily and by people who so desperately want to prove fraud exists that the results will be irrevocably tainted.
While the conspiracy theory appears to have started in QAnon circles, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell says he believes he is the one who turned Trump on to the baseless idea of “reinstatement.”
“If Trump is saying August, that is probably because he heard me say it,” Lindell told the Daily Beast on June 2. Lindell is a vocal Trump supporter and conspiracy theorist who has lied about the election being stolen and advocated for Trump to invoke “martial law” to block Joe Biden from taking office.
Sidney Powell, the ex-Trump campaign lawyer who is being sued for defamation over her voter fraud lies, repeated the reinstatement lie at a QAnon conference in late May.
“He can simply be reinstated … a new inauguration date is set, and Biden is told to move out of the White House, and President Trump should be moved back in,” Powell said at the conference.
The “reinstatement” lie is not the only one GOP voters believe.
Two-thirds of Republicans, or 67%, believe that Biden did not legitimately win the election, according to a CBS News poll from May.
And a PRRI-IFYC poll from May found that nearly 30% of Republicans believe the QAnon claim that “things have gotten so far off track” in the United States that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence.”
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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