Does Trump Believe the Election Was Stolen?

 I think that the most probable answer is, yes, and no.

Common sense tends to think that one either believes something or one does not. This oversimplifies things. In particular, I think, it would oversimplify Trump’s state of mind at various times that he has asserted “the big lie.” 

Every claim that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen has always been and always will be flatly, unequivocally, false. There may well have been times, perhaps when talking with Barr, that Trump was brought to a full realization that none of the conspiracy theories held any water, and that he had indeed lost the election. If he made the stolen election claim while still seized with this understanding, he simply lied.

It is also very likely that there were other occasions on which he claimed the election stolen but was so much in the grips of egomaniacal visions that he really did simply believe what he was then saying.

There is, however, at least one more case. Trump may sometimes have genuinely believed and simultaneously genuinely disbelieved in “the steal.” This is a possibility that the law denies, a denial in which philosophers of the logic of belief (doxastic logic) concur. (See, e.g. Newton C.A. Da Costa and Steven French, “On the Logic of Belief,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 49 (1989), p 434.)

The brain, however, is complex. One coalition of neurons may fire in support of a belief excited by strong desires while another coalition forwards the results of rational analysis of evidence. That puts it very roughly. In Trump’s case both beliefs will be backed by some evidence and some reasoning. Conspiracy theories always have their own evidence, however thin, and arguments, however strained. What conspiracy theories also often have, as this one certainly did for Trump, is enough emotional wallop to flourish even when disbelief has the better evidence and reasoning.

You may think, “Well, if neither side predominates, if there is a tie, then the person neither believes nor disbelieves in the proposition. So that is what we should say about Trump in the case you imagine. He is strongly inclined to believe and strongly inclined not to, but in fact he has not reached either belief or non-belief.” Neither believing nor disbelieving is a perfectly good description of a mental state. Indeed, it is the state we are all in about most possible propositions. (There are infinitely many English propositions of finite length.)

The stolen election claim is clearly not one of the universe of unconsidered propositions, however. The question monopolized Trump’s mind. So, to see whether to accept the contention I have put into your mouth we have to consider the aptness of “predominates” and “ties.” Just what is the test here? What is it for belief to predominate over disbelief or for the two to be “tied”?  The beliefs in a stolen and in an unstolen election have very different credentials and are attractive to Trump for very different reasons. Their strengths are not commensurable.

“How about, it is the one Trump would affirm if asked?” This, however, may well depend upon who asks, why, and where. What he says may vary without their being any change in his belief and disbelief. For Fox he will be concerned to nourish the militance of his base, and, of course, to feed his ego. For a trusted lawyer, he might want to give some sign that he has not gone absolutely off the deep end.

Must Trump have thought, “I am lying now?” In either case? My suspicion is that the question “what should I really, finally believe?” has long disappeared from Trump’s mind as has the question whether he is lying. The only question is “what serves my interest?”

You may still be tempted to think that Trump neither believes nor disbelieves because he has left belief behind altogether. If the last paragraph correctly diagnosis Trump’s current state of mind, then it is less misleading to say he neither believes nor disbelieves than to come down on either side. Yet the very opposite description is really better. His rants about the great cheat are so heated and seem so sincere because he really does believe. Because he has some grasp of the evidence and its assessment by candid friends he also really disbelieves. He is not a poster child for the logicians but should not seem so strange to psychologists.

If the question whther he believed or disbelieved becomes a legal issue, say as an element of a criminal charge, the jury would be required by the judge's instructions to jump one way or the other. Defense counsel would put on good evidence that Trump really believed the election result was the resualt of fraud. Still, I would rather have the prosecutor's job of appealing to the jury's common sense that he must have known it was not. I would only have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he believed he really had lost. I would not have to show that he didn't also believe the opposite.