Newly released polling from the frequent surveying duo YouGov and The Economist shows more registered voters expressing the view that Donald Trump incited violence seen on January 6, 2021, than those saying otherwise.
A full 46 percent of registered voters agreed with the idea that Trump incited “his supporters to engage in violence on January 6, 2021,” while 42 percent disagreed. Among independents, “yes” still led, but the portion saying they weren’t sure had significantly grown.
Only ten percent of Republicans agreed that Trump incited individuals to violence on January 6, though this is a question that’s now been answered by multiple courts in the affirmative, with federal prosecutors also consistently pointing the finger at Trump. Amid a criminal case against the former president over his attempts after the 2020 presidential race to stay in power despite losing, prosecutors have lambasted Trump for his side raising a variety of potential targets for shifted blame, from foreign individuals involved in alleged influence operations to (supposedly present) secret government collaborators to the mayor of D.C. and Congress, who Trump has alleged failed in security responsibilities.
The unsupported conspiracy theory of secret agents perpetrating the Capitol riot has come up even in Congress, where FBI Director Christopher Wray has refuted it. The question of Trump’s responsibility has come up in a series of challenges to his eligibility for office that claim he’s both meaningfully behind the riot and accordingly blocked per the Constitution from holding office again for having engaged in insurrection. One such challenge, which resulted in a tentative ruling against him by Colorado’s Supreme Court, is pending at the nation’s highest court, where observers from the legal profession speaking on MSNBC discussed on Thursday how Trump wasn’t even leading in his arguments with the notion that he didn’t engage in insurrection.
Perhaps it’s an implicit acknowledgement of the strength of indications that he did. Trump’s team instead also incorporates arguments like the dubious notion that blocking him from the ballot would disenfranchise his supporters, meaning effectively strip them of their right to vote. What about the supporters of other candidates who are legally disqualified?
