Donald Trump and his most ardent supporters, like Trump himself, share one common characteristic — they are fundamentally disconnected from reality.
Their lives are engulfed by conspiratorial thinking.
For these people global warming is a hoax, Barack Obama is from Kenya, the Clintons have murdered countless political enemies, the government is coming to take away their guns, the mailman is a spy, there are mind control drugs in the drinking water, and so on and so forth.
Unsurprisingly, now we can add to the long list of absurdities this little gem: the election is rigged against Trump.
The Daily Beast has delved into this latest breed of conspiracy theorist; a group they are calling “polling truthers.”
One such truther is professional twitter troll turned conservative media darling, Bill Mitchell. With now over 70,000 followers on twitter, he broadcasts such nonsensical requests as this:
Imagine polls don't exist. Show me evidence Hillary is winning?
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) August 8, 2016
The Daily Beast reports that according to Mitchell:
“Mainstream polling is skewed to disenfranchise the ‘silent majority’ of Americans who favor the Republican nominee’s ideas.”
And to provide “evidence” for this idea, Mitchell and others of his delusional ilk point to things like the sizes of the audiences at Trump rallies versus Clinton events. Seriously, who needs polling data when one is happy to commit the fallacy of small sample size?
Even Republican pollsters such as Kristen Soltis Anderson find this sort of thinking disturbing:
“Recent highly publicized polling ‘misses’ [have] made it fashionable to question the accuracy of polls. The problem with today’s Trump ‘polling truthers’ isn’t that they have questions about the polls. Hey, the polls could be wrong en masse! It’s possible! It’s that they instead place trust in measures of Trump’s electoral standing that are absolutely bogus and meaningless. That’s not being a prudent, skeptical person; that’s complete delusion.”
It is complete delusion indeed.
But a quick skim of Bill Mitchell’s twitter feed gives us something to look forward to:
If Trump does not win the Presidency, I'll quit Twitter and shut down YourVoice™ Radio on November 9th.
America would be beyond helping.
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) August 17, 2016
Let’s hope that with that promise, this Trump truther is telling the truth.
