Debunking Trump’s Big Lie: Part 6

Why So Many People Believe Trump's Big Lie About the 2020 Election--And Why the Lie Won't Die.

I have previously presented 25 Reasons to Believe Trump Lost the 2020 Election. I HOPE that at least a few Trump supporters will have read my essay and that some of them will start to doubt his claim that the election was stolen from him. But killing a Big Lie is hard, and the reason why it is hard to kill a Big Lie overlaps with the reasons why people fall for the Big Lie in the first place. We must explore three topics to understand why so many people believe the Big Lie despite its extensive debunking. They are:

1. Information silos and the Russian Firehose of Falsehood Propaganda Model.

2. On Bullet Holes in World War II Planes and On Pedophiles: The Missing Data Problem.

3. Brandolini’s Law and the Gish Gallop.

Information Silos and the Russian Firehose of Falsehood Propaganda Model

One obvious reason why people fall for the Big Lie is that those who follow politics closely tend to fall into either right-wing or left-wing information silos. Those in the left wing echo chamber are less likely to be aware of news stories that are important to the right. Those in the right wing echo chamber, which includes Fox, Newsmax, One America News, etc. have heard Trump and his supporters complain hundreds if not thousands of times about various schemes the Democrats had allegedly used to steal the 2020 election from Trump, but they have very seldom heard the rebuttal to those claims.

The Rand Corporation published a study in 2016 that explains why those who are trapped in information bubbles are especially vulnerable to being misled by disinformation campaigns. The study is called The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model. But what does a system of Russian propaganda techniques have to do with the spread of Trump’s Big Lie? Whether consciously or not, Trump and his supporters have spread their claim that Trump was the real winner of the 2020 election by using disinformation techniques that were originally pioneered by the Russians, and the effectiveness of these techniques is multiplied when people are trapped in an information bubble. Steve Bannon even came up with a much catchier phrase to describe this system than “The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model.” He calls it “flooding the zone with shit.”

I encourage you to read the Rand report, but the report is a bit long and academic, so I’ll give you two other options besides reading the full report. First, I’ll give you the super-short Reader’s Digest version. If all you want is a quick and dirty summary of the report, then just read this and skip to the section about bullet holes in World War II planes. And if you want more detail, but don’t have time to read the entire report, then just read the excerpts which I will quote after the quick and dirty summary.

Quick and Dirty Summary

Studies have shown that people will believe a lie if it is repeated often enough. The more often the lie is repeated, the more likely they will be to believe it. People are more likely to believe a lie if they hear it from multiple sources (channels) and multiple modes—that is, if they see it on TV, read it in an online news site, see it in social media posts, and hear it from someone they trust in real life, they are much more likely to believe it than if they hear it from only one source.

They are more likely to believe a lie if it is supported by “evidence”, even if the “evidence” is made up bullshit. And they are more likely to believe the lie if it is told from multiple different viewpoints and backed by different arguments. The people manufacturing the “evidence” to support the lie have two inherent advantages. Those who hear the lie might never see the debunking of the lie. And even if they do see the debunking, people are inclined to believe the first version of an event that they are told.

(Skip to the section about bullet holes in World War II planes)

Excerpts from The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model

We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”

Contemporary Russian propaganda has at least two other distinctive features. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency….

Russian Propaganda Is High-Volume and Multichannel

Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels. This propaganda includes text, video, audio, and still imagery propagated via the Internet, social media, satellite television, and traditional radio and television broadcasting. The producers and disseminators include a substantial force of paid Internet “trolls” who also often attack or undermine views or information that runs counter to Russian themes, doing so through online chat rooms, discussion forums, and comments sections on news and other websites . . . .

Experimental research shows that, to achieve success in disseminating propaganda, the variety of sources matters:

• Multiple sources are more persuasive than a single source, especially if those sources contain different arguments that point to the same conclusion.
• Receiving the same or similar message from multiple sources is more persuasive.
•People assume that information from multiple sources is likely to be based on different perspectives and is thus worth greater consideration.

The number and volume of sources also matter. . . .

The experimental psychology literature suggests that, all other things being equal, messages received in greater volume and from more sources will be more persuasive. Quantity does indeed have a quality all its own. High volume can deliver other benefits that are relevant in the Russian propaganda context. First, high volume can consume the attention and other available bandwidth of potential audiences, drowning out competing messages. Second, high volume can overwhelm competing messages in a flood of disagreement. Third, multiple channels increase the chances that target audiences are exposed to the message. Fourth, receiving a message via multiple modes and from multiple sources increases the message’s perceived credibility, especially if a disseminating source is one with which an audience member identifies.

Russian Propaganda Is Rapid, Continuous, and Repetitive

Contemporary Russian propaganda is continuous and very responsive to events. Due to their lack of commitment to objective reality (discussed later), Russian propagandists do not need to wait to check facts or verify claims; they just disseminate an interpretation of emergent events that appears to best favor their themes and objectives. This allows them to be remarkably responsive and nimble, often broadcasting the first “news” of events (and, with similar frequency, the first news of nonevents, or things that have not actually happened). They will also repeat and recycle disinformation. . . .

The experimental psychology literature tells us that first impressions are very resilient: An individual is more likely to accept the first information received on a topic and then favor this information when faced with conflicting messages. Furthermore, repetition leads to familiarity, and familiarity leads to acceptance:

• Repeated exposure to a statement has been shown to increase its acceptance as true.
• The “illusory truth effect” is well documented, whereby people rate statements as more truthful, valid, and believable when they have encountered those statements previously than when they are new statements.
• When people are less interested in a topic, they are more likely to accept familiarity brought about by repetition as an indicator that the information (repeated to the point of familiarity) is correct.
• When processing information, consumers may save time and energy by using a frequency heuristic, that is, favoring information they have heard more frequently.
• Even with preposterous stories and urban legends, those who have heard them multiple times are more likely to believe that they are true.
• If an individual is already familiar with an argument or claim(has seen it before, for example), they process it less carefully, often failing to discriminate weak arguments from strong arguments.

Russian propaganda has the agility to be first, which affords propagandists the opportunity to create the first impression. Then, the combination of high-volume, multichannel, and continuous messaging makes Russian themes more likely to be familiar to their audiences, which gives them a boost in terms of perceived credibility, expertise, and trustworthiness.

Russian Propaganda Makes No Commitment to Objective Reality

It may come as little surprise that the psychology literature supports the persuasive potential of high-volume, diverse channels and sources, along with rapidity and repetition. These aspects of Russian propaganda make intuitive sense. One would expect any influence effort to enjoy greater success if it is backed by a willingness to invest in additional volume and channels and if its architects find ways to increase the frequency and responsiveness of messages. This next characteristic, however, flies in the face of intuition and conventional wisdom, which can be paraphrased as “The truth always wins.”

Contemporary Russian propaganda makes little or no commitment to the truth. This is not to say that all of it is false. Quite the contrary: It often contains a significant fraction of the truth. Sometimes, however, events reported in Russian propaganda are wholly manufactured, . . .

Why might this disinformation be effective? First, people are often cognitively lazy. Due to information overload (especially on the Internet), they use a number of different heuristics and shortcuts to determine whether new information is trustworthy. Second, people are often poor at discriminating true information from false information—or remembering that they have done so previously….

False statements are more likely to be accepted if backed by evidence, even if that evidence is false:

• The presence of evidence can override the effects of source credibility on perceived veracity of statements.
• In courtroom simulations, witnesses who provide more details—even trivial details—are judged to be more credible. . . .

As noted earlier in the discussion of multiple channels, the presentation of multiple arguments by multiple sources is more persuasive than either the presentation of multiple arguments by one source or the presentation of one argument by multiple sources.

On Bullet Holes in World War II Planes and On Pedophiles: The Missing Data Problem

There is an inherent flaw in all the efforts to prove that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election, and that is the problem of missing data. What do I mean by that? I'll tell you, but first I will tell you two stories--the first is about bullet holes and planes, and the second is about QAnon and pedophilia. Reading these stories will help you better understand the missing data problem.

We had a problem in World War II. Some of our fighter planes sent on missions over Germany weren’t coming back. Others came back riddled with bullet holes. We wanted to make our fighters less vulnerable to German attacks by toughening them up with armor. But the armor was too heavy to cover the entire plane, so we only wanted to protect the most critical areas of each plane with armor, and we didn’t want to use more armor than was necessary to avoid reducing the planes’ maneuverability. So, the question was, “Where should we put the armor?” It turns out that the returning planes had more bullet holes per square foot around the fuselage than the engine. So obviously, we should add extra armor around the fuselage. That’s where the planes were taking the most hits. That’s where we would be getting the most bang for the buck by protecting them. Right?

Wrong. As this fascinating article by Jordan Ellenberg about Abraham Wald and the Missing Bullet Holes explains, Wald noticed that others were jumping to the wrong conclusion because they were looking at only part of the data--they were only using data collected from the planes that returned from their missions. They weren’t thinking about the planes that were shot down and never returned. Ellenberg writes:

Wald’s insight was simply to ask: where are the missing holes? The ones that would have been all over the engine casing, if the damage had been spread equally all over the plane? Wald was pretty sure he knew. The missing bullet holes were on the missing planes. The reason planes were coming back with fewer hits to the engine is that planes that got hit in the engine weren’t coming back. Whereas the large number of planes returning to base with a thoroughly Swiss-cheesed fuselage is pretty strong evidence that hits to the fuselage can (and therefore should) be tolerated. If you go to the recovery room at the hospital, you’ll see a lot more people with bullet holes in their legs than people with bullet holes in their chests. But that’s not because people don’t get shot in the chest; it’s because the people who get shot in the chest don’t recover.

QAnon provides a particularly malicious example of how missing data can give us a warped view of the world. Many right-wingers followed the QAnon disinformation campaign--and a major part of that campaign involved accusing those on the left, and especially Hollywood and intellectual elites, of being pedophiles. If you were on Twitter or any right-wing social media website between 2018 and 2021, you would have found right-wing trolls accusing anyone who opposed Donald Trump of being a pedophile or of supporting pedophiles. It had become the insult of choice for many on the right. And there was no denying it. There were pedophiles among the left and the Hollywood elite. And whenever a story about one of them was published, the QAnon folks and Trump supporters jumped up and down like baboons in heat and yelled, “See! See! This PROVES that the left is evil!”

This had several unfortunate consequences, but I only want to concentrate on one of them here. By trying to portray pedophilia as something that happened only among the left, it overlooked all the right-wing pedophiles who were out there. Magicians are masters of distraction. Their magic tricks work because they get you to concentrate on one hand while the other hand or an assistant is doing the dirty work. Similarly, by getting people to look only for pedophiles on the left, the QAnoners/right-wingers were distracting us from paying attention to the pedophiles on the right.

And there was indeed a problem on the right. How do I know this? A Bluesky user named Cajsa has compiled a list detailing the evidence against hundreds of Republican child rapists. Those on the right NEVER talk about them. And let’s not forget that Jeffrey Epstein, the leader of perhaps the biggest and most vicious pedophile ring in American history, described Donald Trump as his closest friend for 10 years. Marjorie Taylor Greene has said that Trump was furious with her for pushing for the release of the Epstein files because his friends would get hurt. But those who followed QAnon were tricked into thinking pedophilia is a problem on the left because they were looking only at the easily visible part of the data.

So, is pedophilia a greater problem on the right or on the left? I don’t know. But what I do know is if you are only looking at the left for pedophiles, you will only see pedophiles on the left. And if you are only looking for pedophiles on the right, you will only see pedophiles on the right. What is certain is that only looking at part of the data will give you a distorted picture of reality.

Which brings us back to the second reason why we should question whether any new evidence that Trump supporters come up with really proves that Trump won the election. Only one side was scheming before election day to steal the election from the other side. [See the fourth through sixth pieces of evidence in Part 5 of this series] And only one side has been actively turning over every rock and scouring every nook and cranny with a magnifying glass to prove that the other side had cheated and rigged the election. And that side is the Republican side. Democrats may use the court system to challenge close elections, and they may bring challenges in court when they have evidence that there was something seriously wrong with the election. But if they lose in the courts, they shut up and accept the results. They don’t go on a never-ending binge of sour grapes or go on a forever hunt to prove that the election was stolen from them. They recognize that our democracy requires the peaceful transfer of power and that undermining faith in our elections undermines our democracy.

Since only Republicans are looking for evidence that the Democrats have cheated, we will only see evidence (if it exists) of Democrats cheating. But we will not see corresponding evidence (if it exists) of Republican cheating because Democrats aren’t looking for it. So IF, (big IF), Republicans were to find evidence of enough cheating by Democrats to change the election results, that still wouldn’t prove that Trump had legitimately won the election. We would be getting skewed results because we would not be accounting for the missing data of cheating by Republicans.

Brandolini’s Law and the Gish Gallop

It is nearly impossible to debunk every Republican claim that Biden stole the election from Trump because those making such claims have a built-in structural advantage. It is faster and easier to make false claims than it is to debunk them. This is known as Brandolini’s law, or the bullshit asymmetry principle. “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” A claim that takes only a few paragraphs to state could take pages--or even a book--to debunk, especially if it requires obtaining detailed knowledge of a complex specialized subject to do so. You are guaranteed to fall behind when you try to debunk a firehose of falsehoods. They come at you faster than candy whizzing by Lucy on a conveyer belt.

Brandolini’s Law is a close cousin to the Gish Gallop, one of Donald Trump’s favorite debate techniques. Dr. Itamar Shatz provides an in-depth discussion of how this technique works and how to counter it. Here are a few key highlights.

The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique that involves overwhelming your opponent with as many arguments as possible, with no regard for the accuracy, validity, or relevance of those arguments. For example, a person using the Gish gallop might attempt to support their stance by bringing up, in rapid succession, a large number of vague claims, anecdotal statements, misinterpreted facts, and irrelevant comments. . . .

• This technique is used for two main reasons: first, it is generally easier to raise numerous weak arguments than it is to properly refute them, and second, simple arguments are often perceived by people as more compelling explanations than complex refutations, even if those arguments are flawed.

• Gish gallops usually include a combination of unsubstantiated claims, anecdotal statements, misrepresentations of truthful facts, outright lies, irrelevant arguments, unnecessary technical jargon, and various logical fallacies.

A Gish galloper throws out so many arguments that his opponent cannot possibly address them all. And when his opponent does not challenge certain of the galloper’s assertions, then at least some audience members will assume that those assertions must be true. After all, why did his opponent not debunk those points if they were bogus? This is a win for the galloper.

The arguments made by a Gish galloper are a bit like a swarm of hundreds of Russian drones aimed at Ukraine. Ukraine’s air defense is good, but the sheer number of drones guarantees that at least a few will get through and cause damage.

Trump would win his cherished Nobel Prize if only the Nobel Prize Committee gave an award for the fastest Gish galloper. Yes, Trump Gish gallops when he discusses his “evidence” of the 2020 election. But he Gish gallops on so much else as well. I urge you to read two extraordinary columns by Nicole Wisniewski which dissect how Trump uses the Gish gallop in his Truth Social posts.

1. When Trump’s Own General Contradicts Him: Trump posted a 187-word screed that made 12 questionable, misleading, or downright false claims to discredit reports that he was warned by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, that we were in danger of running low on interceptor missiles because of Trump’s war in Iran. Wisniewski debunked Trump’s claims while explaining how Trump uses the Gish gallop to stay ahead of the debunkers.

2. Propaganda Playoffs Week One Winner: Gish Gallop: Trump made 18 claims in one post praising his Big Beautiful Bill while attacking Democrats for being soft on crime and encouraging violent, mentally insane immigrants to flood into our country. It probably took Trump 5 minutes to write a post that took an hour and a half to debunk.

The Ultimate Trump-Won-the-2020-Election Gish Gallop

This post by Donald Trump provides the ultimate example of flooding the zone with shit, the missing data problem, and Brandolini’s law.

The link at the end of Trump’s post leads to a 32-page document entitled, “Summary of Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election in the Swing States.” (The Swing State Report). If you are just interested in a quick and dirty debunking of some of the claims in the Swing State Report, then read this PolitiFact article. But for a deeper understanding, please read on.

The Swing State Report contains more than 125 bullet points “proving” that Trump won the election. Some of the claims had been thoroughly debunked before this report was published. For example, the report cites the organization True the Vote in five of their bullet points to back its claim that there was illegal ballot trafficking in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan. Does the name “True the Vote” ring a bell for you? It should if you read Part 3 in this series. They were the source of the bogus, and probably downright fraudulent claims that were the bases of the thoroughly debunked and discredited 2000 Mules movie.

There are four good reason to believe the Swing State Report that was pushed by Trump was not written in good faith, and if the report was not written in good faith, then all of its claims must be viewed with skepticism.

1. Some of the evidence had been previously debunked.

2. The report was written anonymously. Whoever wrote this report doesn’t want us to know who wrote it or what organization they are associated with.

3. The Washington Post identified Trump campaign staffer Liz Harrington as the author of the report. Gee, do you think someone working for Trump’s campaign might have a reason to bend the truth—or overlook contradictory evidence? Maybe this explains why the author didn’t want us to know her identity.

4. Some of the report’s sources are suspect. For example, Election denier and activist David Cross is cited three times in the footnotes in the Swing State Report’s section on Georgia. Cross has urged other activists to use deception to infiltrate the election infrastructure. Talking Points Memo reports:

Cross, . . . went on to encourage other activists to obtain positions working within election infrastructure. However, he cautioned them to erase their “pro-Trump” digital footprint beforehand.

“You need to be involved as an election worker on Election Day and, if you are going to do that, then go on to your Facebook account and eliminate as much conservative stuff as you possibly can because you will be profiled,” he said. “They will not hire you.”

Other sources for the report seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about the mechanics and safeguards built into the election process. Kevin Moncla was cited four times, and Joseph Rossi was cited twice in the footnotes of the Swing States Report’s section On Georgia. They are also two of the four authors of a 263-page report published in January 2026 entitled “Fulton County: Report of Investigation of the 2020 General Election” (Fulton County Report, also known as the Election Oversight Group Report or EOG Report). The EOG Report provided even more detailed evidence that “proved” that Trump lost Georgia because of criminal behavior by Fulton County election officials. This report is important because it was used as evidence to obtain a search warrant that allowed the FBI to seize election materials from Fulton County related to the 2020 election. The report is important, but is it right?

Three elections experts, Justin Grimmer, Stephen Richer, and Ryan Germany¹, wrote a 58-page report for the States United Democracy Center [States United Report] that revealed deep flaws in the EOG Report.

For example, pages 7 - 8 states

A few examples illustrate the pervasive flaws in the EOG Report. The first “Count” [of the EOG Report] is that voting systems were “reprogram[med] immediately before the 2020 general election.” Putting aside that this allegation is factually inaccurate, the EOG Report does not link machine software to any impact on the election, malfeasance, or fraud. Nor does the EOG Report acknowledge or address the many safeguards in place designed to ensure that voting machines produce accurate results. These safeguards ranged from the use of printed paper ballots that voters were instructed to check for accuracy to the risk-limiting audits designed to detect mismatches between those paper ballots and the votes recorded in the cast vote record (CVR).

The failure to address these safeguards is a significant omission and shows why Count 1 and the broader EOG Report are not logically sound. As this analysis details, in Fulton County in 2020, as in virtually every American election, safeguards designed to detect fraud and errors—including in the programming of machines—were in place. The EOG Report’s failure to address these safeguards—either by simply ignoring them or falsely asserting that they were not employed in the election—is just one indicator of the weakness of its analysis. . .

In other places, the EOG Report misreads evidence and then uses that “evidence” to make false allegations. . .

Purposefully or not, the EOG Report also fundamentally misunderstands the role of certain election records. For example, its claims about unsigned tabulator tapes and purportedly destroyed ballot images (Counts 6 and 7) ignore that neither tabulator tapes nor ballot images are used to generate election results. Nor are they the best evidence of the election outcome. In Fulton County in 2020, as elsewhere in the country, paper ballots and cast vote records are used to both count and verify the results—not tabulator tapes or ballot images. And the EOG Report ignores the fact that neither unsigned tabulator tapes nor missing ballot images is any indication of fraud; the election results can still be verified through the comparison of the actual paper ballots and the cast vote record.

And page 18 states:

First, a complaint to the SEB [State Election Board] by one of the authors of the EOG Report—Joseph Rossi—claimed that errors in Fulton County’s risk-limiting audit undermined the reliability of the 2020 result. The Secretary of State’s investigation determined that, while human data-entry errors occurred, many of the complaint’s allegations were based on misunderstandings about how different files and systems work.

Debunking the entire Swing States report is a Herculean task. Some lies are easy to debunk. Some lies are harder. And some lies require us to understand how they were started and what assumptions they were built upon in order for us to understand their debunking. If we don’t have that deep understanding, then we will be left confused and not knowing who to believe when Team Trump claims, “X is true” and Team Debunker claims, “No, X is false.”

Justin Grimmer, one of the authors of the States United Report, also co-authored another report that explains WHERE many of the false claims made repeatedly about the 2020 election by Team Trump came from and HOW we know those claims are false. There is just one problem with this report. The report is 85 pages long, including references, and it is written in dry academese. What’s worse, some of the claims made by Team Trump were built on a foundation of faulty statistical analysis, and in order to show WHY the statistical analysis relied on by Team Trump is faulty, Grimmer and his co-author, Abhinav Ramaswamy, had to do a bit of statistical analysis themselves. You will struggle to understand parts of this paper if you haven’t taken some college-level courses in statistics. In short, very few Americans will even see this report, even fewer will try to read it, and even fewer will have the statistical background to fully understand it. This paper is a perfect example of Messing’s corollary of Brandolini’s Law: Debunkers are at a disadvantage when it takes a college education to fully understand the debunking of bullshit that is spewed at a ninth grade reading level.

Flooding the zone with shit, the missing data problem, and Brandolini’s Law reinforce each other. They explain why so many people believe the Big Lie and why it is so hard to convince many who believe the Big Lie that it is, in fact, a Big Lie.

Table of Contents For This Series

Part 5: Reasons to Believe Trump Lost the 2020 Election

Part 7: ??? I might or might not write another part. TBD

1. From Page 5 of the States United Report. “The three authors of this analysis are election experts and scholars: Justin Grimmer, professor of political science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; Stephen Richer, former Maricopa County Recorder, Cato Institute legal scholar, and senior fellow Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center; and Ryan Germany, former general counsel for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. This report was commissioned by States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization advancing free, fair, and secure elections.”