Doubt over the election is widely dismissed as crankery, but skepticism of the media elite narrative is hardly unwarranted.
Americans’ trust in government and the media has collapsed. Two months before the presidential election, only 20 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do the right thing” most of the time, according to a Pew Research Center survey. It is unlikely that trust in the government will rebound any time soon, in part because of how the 2020 election was conducted and because the news media has obliterated much of the tattered remnants of its credibility since 2016. Instead, the question is: how much lower can Americans’ trust fall in the political system without a total collapse of legitimacy?
