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, my 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. With one exception, my 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 the Legitimacy Theory would predict. The exception, however, is of utmost importance for American politics: Among African Americans, support for democratic institutions and values waned considerably, largely as a consequence of factors such as the insurrection and experience, vicarious and personal, with unfair treatment by legal authorities.

James L. Gibson is the Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, and Professor Extraordinary in Political Science, Stellenbosch University (South Africa). Gibson’s research interests are in Law and Politics, Comparative Politics, and American Politics. Gibson’s books included the widely acclaimed South African Overcoming Trilogy (Overcoming Intolerance, Overcoming Apartheid, Overcoming Historical Injustices). In 2021, Gibson was elected as an Honorary Foreign Associate of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). In 2011, Gibson received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association and in 2021 he was recognized by the International Society of Political Psychology with the Harold Lasswell Award for Outstanding Scientific Accomplishment in Political Psychology.

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