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I really really liked this reframing. This is probably the closest I've been to changing on my mind on this. I need to think about it more, but my initial thoughts are that Trump did have at least a few people that he picked and should've been on his side on the inside that also told him the claims of fraud weren't real. Yet, he always ignored them and followed the ones telling him there was fraud and he even repeated specific claims of fraud that his people on the inside debunked.
The counter to that counter is that those that didn't think there was fraud were just naive and trusted institutions too much. So, even though Trump picked them, they just ended up being unintentional mouth pieces of the institutions anyway. Anyway, I need to think about this more before I am sure this actually convinced me since this logic can apply to many other situations of institutional trust as well. To be clear, am I understanding this argument correctly where it doesn't actually matter if there was outcome-determinative fraud for the argument to work? Even the spurious reports now have gravity because you can't trust any of the debunking from those institutions, right?
I wouldn't say it doesn't matter, it's just you can't know but have good reasons to be suspicious.
I'll give you a similar example from my own life as a scientist. When I was still a student, I was told that women were preferentially hired as researchers only for the case of equal qualification and I mostly believed it. Then, as a scientific help, I started hearing third-hand talk about committees who would publicly claim this, but behind closed doors actually just decided beforehand they're going to hire a woman no matter what. As a PhD candidate, my (female) supervisor (frustratedly, since she was in favor of a man) flat-out told me that she has been part of such a committee, and that this is not even rare. Of course publicly she obviously would never admit this. Now as a researcher myself, I've been in on hiring decisions, and it's just obvious that you'd always take a woman if you can. You easily double your chances to get grants & publicity with her, you insulate yourself from claims of discrimination, it's just a complete no-brainer. A man needs to be MUCH more competent to make up for this.
But technically, I have no proof how wide-spread this is. Many people are still claiming that this would be some right-wing conspiracy theory, silly them, of course we only hire women for equal or higher qualifications, it says right here in the official regulations, and who would go against official regulations? If there is some public dispute of any particular hiring decision at some random university I will usually have no evidence whatsoever. But from personal experience I don't expect there to be evidence even conditional on the hiring decisions being biased. I also expect the hiring decision to be biased, also from experience, so even if I know literally nothing at all beyond that there is a controversy I'd say it was probably biased anyway.
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