Thomas Edsall’s penultimate paragraph in his New York Times column this morning was this:

“The belief that Donald Trump was denied the White House in 2020 because of Democratic Party fraud is arguably the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of the federal government since the Civil War, if not in American history. It is hard to think of a time when nearly two-fifths of Americans seemed honestly to believe that the man in the White House is there because of theft.”

That sounds right to me, but it may be worth our while to go back and strip the skeleton out of that sentence. “[A] belief is the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of [the Union] the federal government since the Civil War.” The Civil War might be said to rest on a belief as well. Many Americans, south and north, believed that the Union was like a contract and they were willing to see it renegotiated. Lincoln believed it was a permanent organic union and that secession, the kind of negotiation that was being discussed, was impossible. It wasn’t just a bad idea. It was impossible.

These can be called theories of the nature of the union, but they are before they are anything else, beliefs. The beliefs Edsall is talking about are not beliefs of that kind. These beliefs are actually conclusions. One of the possible conclusions is supported by the overwhelming majority of evidence; the other is not.

No “evidence” could be presented about the “true nature of the union.” It was never a matter of enough evidence to support a firm conclusion. About the validity of the 2020 election, there is enough evidence and the determination to “believe” something else instead is what Edsall calls the “challenge to legitimacy.”

That argument sounds more plausible to me than it would have yesterday morning. Yesterday I watched Trump and DeSantis campaign against each other in New Hampshire. Trump is, needless to say, an election Denier. DeSantis can’t afford to take a position on the question. How can they possibly campaign? That’s what I learned yesterday.

In the Trump clip I saw, someone in the crowd appears to have asked him why he keeps beating up on Ron DeSantis. Trump said it was because DeSantis is in second place. He isn’t going to be there long, said Trump, and when someone else is in second place, I’ll beat up on them.

That’s his campaign. I can do whatever I want to people who think they are “the competition” and you can’t stop me.

DeSantis was asked to give a plain answer to the question of his views of what happened on January 6. This is a deadly question to someone who can’t afford to say what happened, nor can he say that it didn’t happen. Not in New Hampshire in the summer of 2023.

So he said this instead. He said that if the 2024 campaign was run on what happened on January 6 and who was responsible for it, the Republicans—he might have said “we Republicans”—are going to lose. If the campaign is run on the contrast between the current mess the country is in and the goals of the Republicans to restore the land to its deserved greatness, then we will win.

In all fairness, DeSantis was talking to a crowd that was willing to take it for granted that “a Republican winning” was a good outcome. That was not what he needed to justify. He needed to say why he was not going to address the most prominent threat to the union he would like to govern. He chose not to.

And it’s going to get worse.