It arose from the belief that the 2020 election was stolen from him and, apparently, from the belief that President Biden was behind the recent conviction of President Trump in Manhattan.
A new CBS News/YouGov poll answers a question I’ve been hoping someone would ask for a while: It gauges how many Americans believe the as-yet-unfounded notion that Biden had something to do with the successful prosecution of Trump in Manhattan.
In the end, 43 percent of Republicans and 80 percent of Republicans agreed that the charges were brought at “direction from the Biden administration” and not simply by “New York prosecutors.”
A clear majority of Americans, 57 percent, do not believe this, but the idea has taken hold among Trump supporters.
To be clear, there is no real reason to believe this. The theory relies heavily on the fact that former senior Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo joined the investigation in 2022. However, Colangelo previously worked in the New York State Attorney General’s office with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) and was involved in Trump-related investigations. This is as much circumstantial evidence and speculation as anything.
Attorney General Merrick Garland categorically denied under oath last week that he ever sent Colangelo to Manhattan, and denied having any contact with him since he joined the district attorney’s office.
The theory has also been emphatically rejected in recent weeks by former Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina, who represented Trump in the early days of his Manhattan prosecution, who called the idea “silly” and “absurd.”
“Joe Biden and the Department of Justice have no affiliation whatsoever with the Manhattan district attorney’s office,” Tacopina said in an interview on MSNBC, adding, “We know that’s not the case, and neither do Trump’s lawyers.”
“The scary thing is that people who say that don’t really know the law or what they’re talking about,” Tacopina told MSNBC.
According to Tacopina’s formula, four in ten Americans have no idea what they’re talking about.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that Trump supporters have come to believe something like this despite a lack of evidence.
- About 4 in 10 Americans and about 7 in 10 Republicans say Biden did not receive the rightful votes in 2020, but Trump’s theory on this has repeatedly crumbled under even the slightest scrutiny. (Trump’s supporters have at least largely come to acknowledge that they lack hard evidence to support their belief.)
- Just as only 20% of Republicans reject the Manhattan conspiracy theory, a previous YouGov poll found that only about one in five Republicans acknowledged that Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election (which he certainly did).
- A majority of Republicans have described the January 6th attack on the Capitol as an attack inspired primarily by Antifa and involving only a few Trump supporters (which is incorrect).
- Half of Republicans deny that Trump even had classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and about half say they were at least “probably” planted (though Trump has acknowledged that he had them, but there is no evidence that they were planted).
Voters often come to believe strange things to defend their allies and implicate their enemies, but the extent to which these have become right-wing beliefs is literally unprecedented in modern times.
And the similarities between the Biden Manhattan theory and the “vote fraud” fever go far beyond the surface level. Then, as now, Republicans won’t claim as many established conspiracies as Trump, but they’re just as committed to sowing doubt. Trump will say there are millions of fraudulent votes, but they’ll only express concerns about mail-in voting and election procedures. He’ll say Biden is behind the Manhattan indictments, but they’ll only question Colangelo.
But even at Garland’s confirmation hearing last week, Rep. Russell Frye (R-South Carolina) readily acknowledged that this was just a theory.
“You may not have had anything to do with that,” Frye told Garland, “but the Department of Justice is perceived to be deeply involved in this matter, and so is the American public.”
Now we have a number that backs up that perception: 43 percent. However, like many of the numbers above, this one is based largely on the highly circumstantial and questionable evidence that Trump said so.
