We all know about the “Big Lie” spread by Donald Trump and his followers in which he claims he won the 2020 presidential election. Though proven wrong countless times, the Big Lie has been followed by a continuous stream of lies. One of the most insidious recent lies being spread by Trump and his MAGA followers is that President Joe Biden authorized the FBI to kill Trump when they were searching for top secret documents he had taken. This is an especially dangerous lie that undermines the safety of FBI agents everywhere.

False information can stimulate violent actions and Trump followers have shown their tendency to take violent actions. The United States, like every society, contains unstable people who are want to cause harm based on false information. The internet today carries a great deal of false information. What is particularly discouraging is that many Republicans, even some who are leaders in the party and should know better, have repeated the falsehood about plans to kill Trump. Anyone who makes this claim cannot claim to be considered a “mainstream” or moderate Republican. They are part of an authoritarian movement which is attracting followers from ordinary people. They have shown a desire to threaten violence and, as we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, people are very capable of following threats with carrying out violence.

A key premise of the federal prosecution’s case against former President Donald Trump for the events leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, is that Trump knowingly repeated false information, then leveraged those lies into actions aimed at overturning the 2020 election. 

The Aug. 1 indictment says Trump was not misinformed, or delusional. Rather, it says he knew that certain claims about the election were false but repeated them anyway, in private and in public.

“The Defendant, his co-conspirators, and their agents made knowingly false claims that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 presidential election,” the indictment says. “These prolific lies about election fraud included dozens of specific claims that there had been substantial fraud in certain states, such as that large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for the Defendant to votes for Biden.”

The indictment posits that Trump was “notified repeatedly that his claims were untrue — often by the people on whom he relied for candid advice on important matters, and who were best positioned to know the facts — and he deliberately disregarded the truth.”

How do you prove what someone was thinking? 

Though this is a hard hurdle for prosecutors to clear, legal experts say it’s not insurmountable. 

“A prosecutor commonly has to show it through circumstantial evidence,” said Joan Meyer, partner with the law firm Thompson Hine LLP and a former federal prosecutor. “The indictment lists the number of highly placed federal and state officials who told Trump that the election was not stolen and chronicles specific instances of Trump’s resistance to this advice.”

Here’s a sampling of instances in which confidants and officials directly told Trump that his claims were inaccurate, according to the indictment.

• Trump said that more than 30,000 noncitizens voted in Arizona. Trump’s own campaign manager told him such claims were false, as did then-Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican who had supported Trump before the election.

• Trump said that Nevada had tens of thousands of fraudulent votes. Nevada’s then-secretary of state, Republican Barbara Cegavske, posted “Facts vs. Myths” on the agency’s website, debunking related claims.

• Trump said there were suspicious ballot handling activities at State Farm Arena in Atlanta. Senior U.S. Justice Department officials debunked this on two different occasions, with one official telling Trump the activities were “benign.” A senior campaign adviser — unnamed in the indictment, as is standard — told Trump this was untrue, calling such claims “conspiracy s— beamed down from the mothership.”

• Trump said there were enough dead voters in Georgia to flip the result in the state. In a phone call, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told Trump the actual number of dead voters was in the low single digits. A counsel to Raffensperger also told Trump that his claim was untrue that thousands of out-of-state residents had voted.

• Trump said there had been a suspicious “vote dump” in Detroit. Then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr told him that this was simply the normal vote-counting process and did not signal fraud. Earlier, the state Senate majority leader, Republican Mike Shirkey, told Trump that he had lost the state because of poor electoral performance.

• Trump said there had been 205,000 more votes in Pennsylvania than there were voters. On at least two occasions, the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, and the acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, told Trump that this was false.

• Trump said there had been more votes in Wisconsin than there were voters. Donoghue debunked this in a conversation with Trump.

The indictment also said Trump ignored a variety of debunkings of his claims that were offered by his own vice president, Mike Pence; the director of national intelligence; the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (whose chief Trump fired after being contradicted); senior White House attorneys; and state and federal court rulings.

“The Defendant’s knowingly false statements were integral to his criminal plans,” the indictment says.

How can the government prove Trump’s state of mind?

Proving intent “is always difficult,” Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights program at the liberal Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, told PolitiFact in July. “But that is a question at issue in almost every criminal prosecution. It’s the kind of thing prosecutors have to prove on a daily basis.”

Bradley Moss, a partner with the law firm Mark S. Zaid, P.C., added that “delusion and refusal to accept reality is not sufficient to disprove you had the requisite intent.”

Ultimately, prosecutors need to have faith in the willingness of juries to make reasonable inferences. 

“Juries typically take their job seriously, and most listen intently and get it right when judging credibility,” said Meyer of Thompson Hine LLP. “Some of the witnesses will be prominent Republicans who joined Trump’s Administration with his approval. It is going to get old if Trump’s attorneys cross examine all of them as if they all are disloyal, disgruntled employees that Trump should have fired. At some point, that will fall flat as a strategy.”

PolitiFact staff writer Amy Sherman contributed to this report.

RELATED: Here’s what Donald Trump asked Georgia election officials in phone call about 2020 election

Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Donald Trump is not going to speak to striking autoworkers on Wednesday. He is going to a non-union auto supplier in Michigan, where he will perform a pro-labor routine in front of workers who are not represented by the UAW. You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise after reading recent press coverage, which has portrayed Trump as some iconoclastic friend of workers.

Take Politico, for example. The first line of a Wednesday night newsletter on the GOP’s coming “labor realignment” said, falsely, that the former president will “address striking auto workers.” (Politico has since deleted “striking, but without a correction. The original version is still visible on the Wayback Machine.) The piece, curiously, does note that the actual location of Trump’s speech in a later paragraph is “Drake Enterprises, a non-union shop” — so why open with a falsehood? Everything else that follows is flawed.

The story goes on to make a muddled case for the supposed realignment, citing Senator Josh Hawley’s visit to a Missouri picket line without mentioning his support for an anti-union “right to work” law. Senator J.D. Vance did say that “workers deserve to get their end of the shake,” but on X, the senator criticized UAW leadership for embracing Joe Biden’s “war on American cars.” It does note that Trump did better than most Republicans have with union households in 2016 but adds that he did a lot worse in 2020. The best evidence Politico can muster for this labor realignment is polling from a right-wing think tank, which shows that 41 percent of Republicans believe unions are a “positive force.” Oren Cass, the former Mitt Romney adviser who leads the think tank, told Politico, “There is no going back to a pre-Trump, 1980s-style conservatism.”

Except once you strip away Trump’s bluster, you see a recognizably Republican creature. His labor lies are proof. The former president wanted people to believe he was speaking to striking autoworkers, but the UAW had not invited him and its president, Shawn Fain, had sharply criticized Trump. The press fell for Trump’s lies anyway.

It wouldn’t be fair to single out Politico without mentioning the New York Times, which reported a day after Biden’s appearance with the UAW in Michigan that Trump has “a mixed legacy on unions.” The accompanying story focuses more on Trump’s personal record as a businessman than on his record as president, which was without exception anti-union and anti-worker. Though the Times does note that his picks to lead the labor department were anti-worker and that he issued executive orders hostile to unions, it makes a lot out of a Trump tale that turned out to be a lie. In 2016, he publicly supported workers facing layoffs at a Carrier plant in Indiana that was outsourcing to Mexico. He pledged a huge tariff to stop such a thing from happening. In the final line of the piece, a reader will learn that Trump, as president, did not follow through. “He lied completely,” as one worker put it. Instead, less than half the jobs were saved and only thanks to incentives from Indiana. There’s his real legacy.

Here’s what else we know about Trump and labor. His Labor secretary, Eugene Scalia, was resolutely anti-union and anti-worker. Scalia rewrote “dozens of rules that were put in place to protect workers,” The New Yorker reported, and during his tenure, OSHA “explicitly told employers that none of its COVID-19 recommendations impose new legal obligations.” Under Trump, the National Labor Relations Board reversed some Obama-era regulations that made it easier for workers to organize. Politico itself reported in 2018 that the Trump administration was “rolling back worker safety protections affecting underground mine safety inspections, offshore oil rigs and line speeds in meat processing plants, among others.” On labor, Trump is an orthodox conservative.

We know that Trump’s “mixed legacy” with labor is, in fact, clear. He likes to sound like a populist, but he is a proven con man. Yet those facts are relatively absent from mainstream coverage right now. Why are political reporters still making such basic mistakes? Why are they even furnishing his lies? Trump’s claims deserve skepticism, at minimum, like any politician. As long as Republican voters prefer Trump in spite of his anti-worker record, and Republican lawmakers are still anti-union, we can hardly speak of “a long coming convergence between his own party and union members,” as Politico does.

That skepticism should have informed press coverage of Trump’s Michigan speech. When the Trump campaign said the former president was speaking to striking autoworkers, reporters should have hedged. That is what Trump said. It is not necessarily what he will do. When additional reporting confirms that Trump was speaking to a non-union shop, that news should be reflected prominently in later coverage and analysis. This shouldn’t be difficult, and yet the press struggles. The failures I address here exist, in part, because there are few labor reporters left on major mastheads. More broadly, they point to deeper problems within the media industry. As my colleague Eric Levitz recently argued, a paper or news channel can find it difficult to cover Trump “without sounding like a shrill, dull, Democratic propaganda outlet.” Therefore the media “comports itself as an amnesiac, or an abusive household committed to keeping up appearances, losing itself in the old routines, in an effortful approximation of normality until it almost forgets what it doesn’t want to know.” In such circumstances, the press should ask itself if objectivity is even possible, let alone desirable. The truth will not long withstand business as usual.

We all know about the “Big Lie” spread by Donald Trump and his followers in which he claims he won the 2020 presidential election. Though proven wrong countless times, the Big Lie has been followed by a continuous stream of lies. One of the most insidious recent lies being spread by Trump and his MAGA followers is that President Joe Biden authorized the FBI to kill Trump when they were searching for top secret documents he had taken. This is an especially dangerous lie that undermines the safety of FBI agents everywhere.

False information can stimulate violent actions and Trump followers have shown their tendency to take violent actions. The United States, like every society, contains unstable people who are want to cause harm based on false information. The internet today carries a great deal of false information. What is particularly discouraging is that many Republicans, even some who are leaders in the party and should know better, have repeated the falsehood about plans to kill Trump. Anyone who makes this claim cannot claim to be considered a “mainstream” or moderate Republican. They are part of an authoritarian movement which is attracting followers from ordinary people. They have shown a desire to threaten violence and, as we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, people are very capable of following threats with carrying out violence.

This is why the lie about violence being authorized against Donald Trump must be taken very seriously for the harm it can do. Honesty requires us to recognize that violence lies beneath the surface in most people, but certainly in American society. It has surfaced throughout our history, most obviously in the Civil War, but also in various violent actions, such as lynchings that were all too common for more than a century after the Civil War.

The language that is currently being used to stir up followers of Trump is “existential,” meaning that the very existence of America is threatened and that it is necessary to act to “save” the nation. However, the existential language of Trump and his followers requires existential language to oppose it. I believe that it is essential for those who do not believe the lies about the “stolen election” and the additional lies up to the present must face the current existential situation: the existence of our democracy is a stake. The evidence is that so many of the tactics used by Trump and the MAGA extremists are parallel to the assault of fascists on European countries in the 1930s.

The best defensive approach is to use truth and honesty to expose falsehoods and demand that officials act with integrity. First, members of the Supreme Court must make sure that the decisions of the justices are not compromised by wealthy friends and partisan influence. This is no trivial matter. It arises from the Supreme Court lacking an enforceable code of ethics and oversight of recusal decisions. The Supreme Court needs to restore the confidence of the American people in it.

America is at a crisis point in which it will move in one of two directions. The direction I hope we take is to continue making progress, marked principally by the increasingly full and equal participation of all ethnic groups and the willing regulation of economic forces so that they will have a positive contribution to all the people in our society and will be used to protect the beautiful natural world in which we live.

The other direction America might take is toward an authoritarian government in which voting rights are reduced, racial jerrymandering goes unchecked, taxes on the rich are reduced leading to ever larger fiscal deficits, the Supreme Court continues to demonstrate partisan bias, reproductive rights of women are blocked nationally and LGBTQA+ rights are not protected. These alternatives to progress could be restated as: whether America will continue to exist as a democratic nation in which freedom and human rights are guarded. America is not a perfect nation, but we have made progress through the struggle and sacrifice of many people. We continue to need the determination of our people to protect our democracy and preserve liberty and justice for all.

More: Opinion: Democratic freedom will endure as long as America has a stable election process

More: Opinion: America is a major world-stage target in anti-democracy propaganda

Rev. Robert L. Montgomery, Ph.D., lives in Black Mountain.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: Trump spreading lies that the FBI authorized to kill him

Gov. Ron DeSantis made a campaign appearance in Nevada a couple of months ago, and told a group of GOP voters that he was concerned that his party had “developed a culture of losing.” The Florida Republican was cautious, however, about the details: He didn’t explicitly say that Donald Trump was a part of this culture.

The apprehension was understandable, because the intra-party pressures surrounding the former president’s defeat were — and are — complex and potentially damaging. On the one hand, DeSantis wants Republican voters to know they should steer clear of candidates who’ve already lost. On the other hand, more than two-thirds of GOP voters have embraced Trump’s bonkers conspiracy theories and see Joe Biden’s presidency as illegitimate, reality notwithstanding.

If DeSantis were to say that the former president really did lose, he’d risk being seen by most of his party’s base as a traitor who sided with Democrats, election officials, judges, and people with access to calculators. If the governor were to say that Trump’s lies were true, and that the 2020 race was “rigged,” he’d undermine GOP voters’ motivation for a new and different nominee.

What would DeSantis do about this? It took a while, but we now finally have an answer. NBC News reported on comments the Floridian made while campaigning in Iowa.

Asked by a reporter during a campaign stop in Iowa whether the 2020 election was “stolen,” DeSantis said the fraud theories “did not prove to be true.” He did not, however, mention the name of his top rival for the GOP nomination, who was just indicted for allegedly working to overturn the last presidential election.

To be sure, the governor did not come right out and say, “Trump lied about his defeat,” despite the fact that Trump really did lie about his defeat, but DeSantis went considerably further than he has before.

“I’ve said many times, the election is what it is,” DeSantis said. “All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true.” He added that assorted theories, “you know, proved to be unsubstantiated.”

Note the classic and clumsy use of passive voice: The Florida Republican referenced “theories that were put out,” carefully avoiding reference to those responsible for the theories. It was effectively DeSantis’ way of saying lies were told, instead of pointing to those who told the lies.

What’s more, I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention that the phrase “the election is what it is” has no apparent meaning.

Nevertheless, the GOP governor has dodged questions about Trump and the 2020 race repeatedly for months, and he’s never come close to saying what he said today.

This shift appears to reflect the simple fact that DeSantis couldn’t stick to the same vague rhetoric indefinitely and expect to win his party’s nomination. To succeed, he’ll need to convince a whole lot of Republicans that Trump peddled nonsense and lost his re-election bid — which, fortunately for the governor, is what actually happened.

Having facts on his side, however, might not be enough, and it’s all but certain that Trump will seize on these comments as evidence of DeSantis siding with the reality-based community over the 69% of Republican voters who actually believe the former president’s “Big Lie.”

I won’t pretend to know whether this grudging acknowledgement of the truth — late on a Friday afternoon in early August — will help or hurt DeSantis’ candidacy, but at least it’s something new and different, in a race that’s been gradually slipping away from him.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.