TY - JOUR
T1 - Angry about Fraud
T2 - How Congress Took up Trump's Claims of Fraud
AU - Brown, Heath
AU - Cormack, Lindsey
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.
PY - 2021/7/1
Y1 - 2021/7/1
N2 - Talk of fraud dominated President Donald J. Trump's campaign and time in office. In this article, we explore whether members of Congress followed Trump's lead in discussing all types of fraud, including electoral fraud as well as fraud, waste, and abuse. Using a unique dataset of the universe of congressional electronic newsletters from 2010 to 2021, we show that Republicans wrote to constituents about fraud much more than Democrats, especially about electoral fraud after Trump's election, but it was Democrats who used angrier rhetoric to discuss fraud, a check on the President and many of the false claims about voter fraud in 2016 and 2020. These findings show an important aspect of the inter-party and inter-branch dynamics at play during Trump's presidency; once keen to focus on fraud, waste and abuse in government congressional Republican attention shifted once the head of the executive branch was a co-partisan to parroting the claims of electoral and voter fraud made by the President.
AB - Talk of fraud dominated President Donald J. Trump's campaign and time in office. In this article, we explore whether members of Congress followed Trump's lead in discussing all types of fraud, including electoral fraud as well as fraud, waste, and abuse. Using a unique dataset of the universe of congressional electronic newsletters from 2010 to 2021, we show that Republicans wrote to constituents about fraud much more than Democrats, especially about electoral fraud after Trump's election, but it was Democrats who used angrier rhetoric to discuss fraud, a check on the President and many of the false claims about voter fraud in 2016 and 2020. These findings show an important aspect of the inter-party and inter-branch dynamics at play during Trump's presidency; once keen to focus on fraud, waste and abuse in government congressional Republican attention shifted once the head of the executive branch was a co-partisan to parroting the claims of electoral and voter fraud made by the President.
KW - Donald Trump
KW - U.S. Congress
KW - anger
KW - fraud
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85112018178&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1515/for-2021-0004
DO - 10.1515/for-2021-0004
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85112018178
VL - 19
SP - 77
EP - 95
JO - Forum (Germany)
JF - Forum (Germany)
IS - 1
ER -