Post-shooting, the RNC is about 2024 but 2020 and Jan. 6 are still on minds of Pittsburgh delegates

In back from left, Dan Savage, of Scott Township, and Pati and Chad Rockwell, of Jefferson, all members of the Trump-supporting group MAGA Warriors, display their flags during roadside rally for the former president on Thursday, July 11, 2024, in North Strabane Township. The group makes videos of the Trump events they attend to post on YouTube and Rumble. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)

Rick Saccone marched on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, posting photos and video to Facebook from outside as a violent mob ransacked the building, aiming to stop the certification of then-President Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

This week, the former state lawmaker from Elizabeth Township is attending another, more traditional event aimed at propelling Trump to a second term: Saccone is an elected delegate to the Republican National Convention, formalizing Trump’s position as the party’s 2024 nominee in Milwaukee.

Delegates, bound to vote for the winner of their state’s primary, play a ceremonial but sought-after role in the political system. The crowd on the convention floor is filled with party insiders and grassroots activists — the lifeblood of the party.

The convention, years in the planning, suddenly took on a new tone and gained new meaning for Republicans after an assassination attempt on Trump in Butler on Saturday. Already bullish on their November chances, Republicans shaken by an attempt on the former president’s life say they headed to Milwaukee even more energized than before.

“In general, I think it’s helped to kind of unite the Republicans and Trump supporters and make them more optimistic about the election,” said Dave Majernik, a convention delegate from Plum. “… That’s the feeling I get when talking to people here at the convention. That they’re more determined and optimistic and excited about it.”

Majernik said many in his circles view the assassination attempt as another in a series of challenges thrown at Trump, citing court cases and the claims ( rejected in 60-plus court rulings) that there was systemic fraud in the 2020 election.

“The guy is an iron man that he put up with so many obstacles and he’s still fighting,” Majernik said.

Interviews with a handful of GOP delegates from the Pittsburgh area, conducted mostly before the shooting, suggest that Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being “stolen” from him, and his downplaying of Jan. 6 , have become commonplace in the Republican Party’s activist core.

“They cheated once, the gig is up,” said John Fredericks, a conservative talk radio host who will represent part of Southwestern Pennsylvania at the convention.

Majernik, a Plum councilor, said he thinks Trump should have won in 2020, despite a lack of concrete evidence produced in the last four years.

The biggest news from the convention’s first day — Trump’s naming of “Hillbilly Elegy” author and U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, as vice presidential nominee — reflected GOP comfort with Trump’s actions in the wake of his loss to Biden. In a February interview with ABC News , Vance endorsed a 2020 plan for Trump backers to have alternate slates of electors in states Trump lost in a bid to overturn the electoral college defeat and said, “The U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.”

It’s not just Pittsburgh’s delegates who are embracing false narratives about the 2020 election. The Boston Globe reported at least 17 people who served as so-called fake electors for Trump in 2020 would be headed to Milwaukee as delegates.

Jan. 6 ‘a great event’

While criticism of Trump and Jan. 6 riot participants was swift and somewhat bipartisan in the immediate aftermath, GOP officials quickly began downplaying the event’s danger and seriousness, with Trump even calling convicted rioters “hostages.” At least one is now describing the storming of the Capitol in much different terms than he did then.

When party voters chose delegates to send to the RNC in Milwaukee, Saccone was the top vote-getter in his district.

Saccone said in a recent interview with PublicSource that he was not aware of the violence occurring around and inside the Capitol when he posted a video of himself at the attack on Facebook, along with the caption: “We are storming the [C]apitol. Our vanguard has broken thru the barricades. We will save this nation.”

During the interview, almost four years later, he said those words were “hyperbole.”

“You go to a football pep rally, and you say we’re gonna crush them and kick their butts,” Saccone said.

He said the march on the Capitol was marred by “no bathrooms, no port-o-potties, nothing,” but was otherwise “a great event, there was dancing and singing, most of the people there didn’t realize that there were people on the other side of the Capitol trying to stir things up.”

In reality, rioters were assaulting police officers and breaking into the halls of Congress, forcing lawmakers into hiding.

Saccone said as soon as he found out “something is actually happening,” he took down the Facebook video.

Like many in his party, Saccone downplayed Trump’s role in stoking his supporters with false claims of a stolen election, summoning them to the capital and urging them to “fight like hell” that day.

Election denialism persists without evidence

A slew of official audits, media reports and court decisions (some from Trump-appointed judges) confirmed in 2020 and 2021 that there was no systemic fraud in the 2020 election, and no instances of fraud on a scale that could have changed the outcome.

But Trump continued repeating the false claims he made to the crowd on Jan. 6, all the way through the early stages of his 2024 campaign. At a June rally in Philadelphia , he wrongly said there was “egregious” cheating in Pennsylvania, and repeated his false accusations of fraud during the June 27 debate with Biden.

At the Butler rally, just minutes before Trump was injured in the assassination attempt, he told the crowd of supporters that “our country has been stolen from us” and that the 2020 election was “rigged.”

His sustained campaign of misleading claims has convinced a large swath of the Republican Party. A 2023 poll commissioned by CNN, which surveyed Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, found 63% of respondents believe Biden’s 2020 win was not legitimate.

Majernik, the Plum councilor and RNC delegate, said he has been active in the GOP since 1996. Bob Dole was the Republican nominee for president then. He’s still with the party in its modern, Trumpian form, and thinks Trump would have won in 2020 were it not for the fraud Trump describes at his rallies.

“I just think he should have been more tempered in some of the things he said and did,” Majernik said of Trump’s efforts to change the outcome of the 2020 election. “That allowed his enemies to focus on that and portray him as a crazy person.

“I really believe the Democrats are trying to position Trump as against democracy and if he gets elected he’s going to turn the country into a dictatorship and that’s just crazy. He was president for four years and he never did that.”

Fredericks said the 2020 election was “absolutely, 100%” stolen, citing the existence of ballot drop boxes and mail-in ballots that were returned after polls closed.

The liberal-leaning Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered counties to accept late ballots due to the pandemic and postal delays; while the idea was criticized by Republicans, it was upheld at the time by the U.S. Supreme Court and there were not nearly enough of such ballots to make a difference in the election. There has been no evidence that there was systemic fraud involving ballot drop boxes or drop-off sites.

Sam DeMarco, the chair of the Republican Committee of Allegheny County and a member of the county’s Board of Elections and County Council, was not selected by the state GOP committee as an at-large delegate to the RNC this year, after serving as one in 2016 and 2020.

DeMarco has said in interviews in recent years that there was not widespread fraud in Pennsylvania that could have changed the outcome of the 2020 race. He has faced some backlash from his membership for that stance and narrowly survived a challenge to his chairmanship in 2022.

The 2023 CNN poll suggests that a lack of hard evidence has not stopped many on the right from believing the 2020 vote was improper. Of those who told pollsters they thought Biden’s win was illegitimate, 52% said they think there is “solid evidence,” with the other 48% citing “suspicion only.”

“Nobody can prove it because nobody has all the facts,” Majernik said, noting that he thought the recently recalled documentary “2000 Mules” made some “compelling points.”

Pressed for specifics on where he saw large-scale fraud in Pennsylvania in 2020, Fredericks said, “The fraud was on the ground,” and alleged “ballot harvesting” — a process in which one person gathers and delivers the votes of many others, which is not allowed in the state.

He said incorrectly that the state sent ballots out to all voters automatically. In reality some voters received mail-in ballot applications, which voters then had to return along with proof of their identity to receive a ballot.

“We still don’t know” if the 2020 election was stolen, Saccone said. “We can’t get all the answers.”

Christopher Beem, a Penn State research professor and managing director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, said the “cognitive dissonance” between a lack of hard evidence and the continued belief in fraud claims would be unlikely to sustain in the long run — if Trump were not pushing the ideas so consistently.

“I am virtually certain that the only reason this continues is because Donald Trump continues it,” Beem said. “If Donald Trump were to say, ‘Let’s move on, it’s a new election, I’m not here to relitigate the 2020 election,’ I think that’s what the Republican base would say as well.”

DeMarco suggested that the local delegates may not reflect where the party is broadly. There were few other candidates for voters to choose, DeMarco pointed out, and some benefited from high name recognition, like Saccone. He also noted that some people even more deeply embroiled with the 2020 election denialism movement tried and failed to become delegates.

“The folks that were selected are the majority of the candidates that ran,” DeMarco said. “They represent the further right fringe of the party than the mainstream.”

Is a repeat in store?

Trump, party activists and scholars agree on one thing: The Nov. 5 election could be the subject of fresh attacks from figures on the right, who repeatedly say they will only accept the results under certain circumstances and have still not conceded their loss in the last election.

“I have zero expectation they’re going to accept this result unless they like the outcome,” said Chris Bonneau, a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh. “… In the Republican primary, it was pretty clear that this is where the party is in terms of election denialism. I don’t think we should expect anything else.”

Trump, in the June 27 debate, said after repeated questioning that he would only accept the election results “if it’s a fair and legal and good election.”

Fredericks said Trump will win “if we get a legitimate election,” saying he is encouraged by “voter integrity infrastructure” the GOP has put in place since 2020. He said this includes additional lawyers to respond to “shenanigans,” and poll watchers and poll workers to look out for fraud.

Majernik said he is worried about fraud recurring this year but he hopes the Republicans have “learned a lesson” and put more effort into election integrity.

Saccone, asked if he would head to the Capitol again on Jan. 6, 2025, if Trump urges supporters to do so, offered this:

“I don’t think he would do such a thing, ask anyone to convene there. If the election doesn’t seem to be honest, if there’s enough voter fraud exposed, people are going to ask questions … if you want things to go smoothly, be transparent, let everybody see.”

Charlie Wolfson is PublicSource’s local government reporter. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org .

This story was fact-checked by Laura Turbay .

This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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