Did Trump and his MAGAites inflict damage on American political institutions via election denialism and the assault on the U.S. Capitol? While most pundits and many scholars find this a question easy to answer in the affirmative, to date, little rigorous evidence has been adduced on Trump’s institutional consequences. Based on surveys of representative samples of the American people in July 2020, December 2020, March 2021, and June 2021, Gibson’s analysis examines in great detail whether American political institutions lost legitimacy over the period from before the presidential election to well after it, and whether any such loss is associated with acceptance of the “Big Lie” about the election and its aftermath. His highly contrarian conclusion is simple: try as they might (and did), Trump and his Republicans did not in fact succeed in undermining American national political institutions. The empirical evidence indicates that institutions seem to be more resilient than many have imagined, just as Legitimacy Theory would predict.

James L. Gibson is the Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. His book on this subject, Democracy’s Destruction? The 2020 Election, Trump’s Insurrection, and the Strength of America’s Political Institutions, is forthcoming from the Russell Sage Foundation, May 2024.

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