Sixty-six percent of registered voters blame Donald Trump (either a great deal, 55%, or somewhat, 11%) for the storming of the Capitol building. The consensus of opinion is hardly surprising: Trump was there. He had urged his supporters to come to the Capitol on January 6 — “Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted — after spending months crying fraud after losing the election decisively to Biden (a “fake president”), trying to overturn the results in court after court, in appeals to governors, state legislators, secretaries of state, and others. He implored the crowd of his supporters on January 6:

Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down–

We’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol–

And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.

He meandered through a string of lies about the results of the election, made-up charges of voting fraud, complaints of disloyal Republican officials, and — despite his pledge to march with the crowd — drove directly back to the White House. The revved-up Trump enthusiasts took it from there.

Only 28% of Republicans blame Trump for the sacking of the U.S. Capitol. Instead, a majority — 52% — of Republicans blame Joe Biden: 35% place a great deal of blame on Biden, while 17% say he is somewhat to blame.

There’s nothing in the water that Republicans drink that explains this perception. Rather, Republican voters are — unsurprisingly — listening to the national leadership of their party: the President, Republican senators and members of Congress, and most emphatically, Fox News Channel, along with conservative talk radio and websites on the right trafficking in alternate facts. And these sources have been on a raging campaign of disinformation for months, with nary a dissenting voice.

This is their tribe. And though it was folks at the Trump rally, waving Trump flags (American flags, Confederate flags, Gadsden flags) and banners (“Stop the steal,” “Jesus is My Savior, Trump is My President,” “Unleash the Kraken,” “Q”), and enthusiastically cheering Trump on, who marched to the Capitol, broke through police lines, smashed through doors and windows, and trashed the place — Joe Biden (the fake president), the man who somehow, someway stole an election (without leaving a trace of evidence), was responsible.

To come to any other conclusion contradicts what these voters are convinced they know. For certain. After hearing it day in, day out.

The message from the most influential source (apart from Trump himself) — Fox News Channel — for those in the bubble, is delivered slickly, professionally, with the look and feel of a genuine news report — with clear intent to deceive. When the actual news is inconvenient, shift attention to something else (even something manufactured out of whole cloth).

Kevin Drum offers a summary of the disinformation technique as mastered by Laura Ingraham:

In a nutshell, it goes like this:

1. 1. Introduce scary story about minor state legislation that has no chance of ever going anywhere.
   2. Invent out of whole cloth a segue into racism as a public health issue.
   3. Conclude that liberals want to lock up white people they disapprove of.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the pros do it.

Editor’s note: more to come.

(Image above headline: ABC News.)