Donald Trump – against all evidence to the contrary – continues to maintain that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden cheated him out of the 2020 Presidential Election.
Trump is, of course, lying . . . because that’s what Trump does.
He is a pathological liar.
Trump has a facial tick that reveals when he is lying: His lips move.
The Washington Post chronicled that Trump made 30 thousand lies or misstatements during his four-year presidency. The newspaper keeps an accessible data base.
That figure was restricted to public statements.
There is no reason to believe anything he says.
There is no point fact-checking Trump because he uses no facts.
There is as much evidence that Donald Trump led American troops on D-Day as there is evidence that he won the 2020 Presidential Election.
And yet this lie — and its staying power — threatens the legitimacy of electoral system. This threatens our faith in democracy. And this is what a dictator wants to assume power.
Two-thirds of Republicans say Biden’s win in the election was illegitimate.
If you believe Trump won the 2020 Presidential Election, you’ve been conned by Don the Con. If you’re going to vote for him in November, you’re as much a threat to our democracy as Trump Is.
Republicans believe this because they were told by Trump’s sycophants in the news media. The Trump news media and his accomplices in the GOP told this lie so many times it’s now accepted by so many.
But Fox News and Newsmax accept the fact that Biden won the election.
Fox News CEO Rupert Murdoch accepts the fact that Biden won the election.
Newsmax accepts the fact that Biden won the election.
One America News has done the same.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pro-trump-oan-admits-no-election-fraud-georgia-2020-2022-5
But this came only after Fox, Newsmax, and OAN learned that crime – or lying — doesn’t pay; in fact, lying can be it costly.
NBC News reported that the influential far-right site, The Gateway Pundit, filed for bankruptcy in response to defamation suits filed by election security companies Dominion Voting Services and Smartmatic. Dominion and Smartmatic charged that Gateway made false claims of vote rigging during the 2020 Presidential Election.
In addition, Smartmatic reached a settlement with One America News Network, another right-wing website, which also spread false election fraud claims.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/16/media/oan-smartmatic-settlement/index.html
Smartmatic’s lawsuit continues against Newsmax for its voting-rigging claims.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/24/media/newsmax-smartmatic-defamation-case/index.html
Fox News last year paid another company, Dominion Voting Systems, $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit.
It’s worth noting that the truth is an absolute defense in libel suits. If these news sites – and I use that word loosely – had told the truth they would have been immune from defamation lawsuits.
Those who believe Trump, according to an article in The Conversation, a website that includes links to sources with every statement, believe that “’massive’ fraud occurred in certain states (fake voters, rigged voting machines, etc.) with the blessing of election officials and unscrupulous judges, thus tipping the contest.”
The article then added this disclaimer: “Of course, there is no evidence of fraud that could have changed the outcome, and all the lawsuits challenging the results have been lost after hearings on the merits or dismissed as moot – even by judges he hand-picked.”
Here’s what we know to be true:
USA Today reported that the Trump campaign filed 62 lawsuits that challenged the results of the 2020 election and sixty-one failed.” The decisions came from Democratic-appointed and Republican-appointed judges.
Trump’s lone victory came in Pennsylvania when a state judge ruled that “voters could not go back and “cure” their ballots if they failed to provide proper identification three days after the election.”
The ruling affected few votes, USA Today reported.
Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, who had slavishly supported Trump by gutting the Mueller report about Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, said there was “no evidence of widespread fraud in the presidential election.”
Barr said that that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security examined the claims of election fraud and found nothing to support those claims.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/01/politics/william-barr-election-2020/index.html
In addition, Trump’s top election security chief, Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, tweeted that “a report citing 59 election security experts saying there is no credible evidence of computer fraud in the 2020 election outcome.”
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” Krebs said.
https://www.vox.com/2020/11/13/21563825/2020-elections-most-secure-dhs-cisa-krebs
How did Trump, a pathological liar, lifelong con man, and narcissistic megalomaniac, respond?
Trump fired Krebs.
Trump attorney Joe DiGenova, appearing on Newsmax, said that Krebs should be “shot” for contradicting the president’s conspiracy theories. “Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity,” DiGenova said, “that guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/30/trump-campaign-lawyer-cybersecurity-chief-shot-441577
Krebs filed a civil lawsuit against DiGenova, the Trump campaign, and Newsmax, accusing them of “defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, aiding and abetting, and civil conspiracy.” He reported he received “a barrage of threats and harassment” as a result of DiGenova’s comments and “faces a genuine risk of imminent harm.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/chris-krebs-sues-trump-lawyer-joe-digenova-lawsuit-2020-12
DiGenova later apologized.
https://www.axios.com/2021/04/11/trump-lawyer-digenova-apologizes-krebs
If DiGenova had been telling the truth, there would have been no reason to apologize.
Trump and his team, having lost in court and thwarted from changing the results by threatening to assassinate the chief of election security, then did what any monkey in a zoo would do when frustrated.
They began throwing feces.
During a press conference on November 19, 2020, Sidney Powell, an attorney for Donald Trump, claimed that Trump had actually won the election in a landslide but that voting machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems rigged the election. She added that the plot to rig the election involved Venezuela, Cuba, China, Hugo Chavez, George Soros, and the Clinton Foundation.
Oh, yes, and the CIA was involved.
And George Soros.
And maybe Elvis.
Perhaps Robert DeNiro.
Powell then called for Republican state legislators in swing states to disregard the results and appoint electors who would cast their votes for Trump.
Here’s the best part: She offered absolutely no evidence to support her claims.
Not even a fake receipt from the phony Clinton-backed pizza parlor that reportedly ran a human-trafficking and child-sex ring.
Powell’s claims were so extreme, so mind-boggling bonkers, that they were repudiated by other Trump sycophants, including Tucker Carlson of Fox News, who said Powell became defensive and then silent when asked for evidence.
In a mid-December 2020 meeting, six weeks after the election, Powell demanded that other Trump supporters join her in her psychotic episode to seize voting machines to overturn the election.
“It’s basically Sidney versus everybody,” one source familiar with the meeting said. “That is why voices were raised. There is literally not one motherf—-r in the president’s entire orbit — his staunchest group of supporters and allies — who doesn’t think that Sidney Powell should be on that first rocket to Mars.”
https://www.yahoo.com/now/trump-reportedly-meeting-michael-flynn-062121690.html
Trump denied that Powell had ever been his attorney.
Trump was lying.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-distances-sidney-powell-plea-deal-rcna121695
Rudy Giuliani, another Trump attorney who has since been indicted disbarred for his repeated lies about the election’s results, Fox News and other right-wing outlets from repeating the Trump team’s accusations that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged the election for Biden.
https://apnews.com/article/giuliani-new-york-disbarred-81b327f9ab1f98548cb888f8e652c9a8
Giuliani kept digging and digging and digging to find someone – anyone, anyone, anyone — who could corroborate the Trump World’s accusation that there was widespread election fraud.
He found Melissa Carone, who worked as a temporary IT contractor with Dominion Voting Services.
It didn’t seem to matter to Farting Rudy Giuliani that his witness was as bat-shit crazy as Sidney Powell or Giuliani for that matter.
Giuliani brought Carone to a hearing of the Michigan House Oversight committee.
Giuliani’s farts made far more sense than anything Carone said.
Giuliani’s farts provided the only appropriate soundtrack for Carone’s testimony.
She insisted without proof that tens of thousands of votes had been counted twice.
She claimed that a poll book, the register that chronicles the names of everyone who voted, was “off by 30 thousand.”
When told that this wasn’t correct, she snapped: “Did you take it and do something crazy to it?”
When she was questioned another one of her claims, she loudly responded:
“I know what I saw. And I signed something saying if I’m wrong, I can go to prison,” and then paused added add, “Did you?”
Slate responded by saying that the hearing was designed to reveal Trump World’s lies about election fraud. Instead, Slate said, “the event was so detached from reality that Rudy Giuliani was not the most embarrassing thing about it — despite the fact that he audibly farted mid-presentation.
The clip of Carone’s exchange went viral and was viewed about nine million times in the next few days.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/12/melissa-carone-michigan-testimony-not-funny.html
SNL cast member Cecily Strong portrayed Carone saying: “I personally saw hundreds if not thousands of dead people vote. I am not lying. I signed an After David.”
Dominion Voting Services sent Carone a cease-and-desist letter.
“Without a shred of corroborating evidence, you have claimed that you witnessed several different versions of voter fraud — ranging from one story involving a van, to other accusations that votes were counted multiple times,” the letter continued. “You published these statements even though you knew all along that your attacks on Dominion have no basis in reality,” the letter said.
Giuliani’s star witness also had repeatedly lied about her education credentials.
Giuliani also learned that lies have consequences.
New York State disbarred Giuliani for lying repeatedly that Biden had cheated to prevent Trump from winning the presidency in 2020.
https://apnews.com/article/giuliani-new-york-disbarred-81b327f9ab1f98548cb888f8e652c9a8#
In addition, a federal judge ordered Giuliani in December 2023 to pay the $148 million in damages for defaming two George election workers by saying they manipulated ballots. Giuliani admitted to the judge that he had lied in his statements about the women.
Fox News agreed in April 2023 to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to resolve a defamation suit over the network’s repeated airing of false and damaging claims that said, among other things, the voting technology company had rigged the 2020 Presidential Election for Biden.
Dominion Voting sued Fox for $1.6 billion arguing that the news network had peddled “phony conspiracy theories that claimed its equipment switched votes from former President Donald Trump to Democrat Joe Biden,” the New York Times reported.
There was no evidence for such claims.
Or did I say that already?
Court depositions revealed that Fox’s high-profile talent – including, but not restricted to, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham — knew that Biden won the election but spread disinformation anyway.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/business/media/fox-dominion-lawsuit.html
CNN reported that the correspondence included in the depositions and other court documents “reveals that the network’s senior-most executives and highest-profile hosts chose not to disclose what they believed to be the truth of the election out of fear that that the facts would alienate Fox News’ audience and throw the highly profitable business into ruin.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/17/business/fox-news-dominion-lies/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2020/12/27/fox-news-viewers-switch-to-newsmax
Newsmax has also abandoned its false claims about the 2020 Presidential Election.
Trump appeared on Newsmax in August 2023, where he repeated his debunked claims that he had won the 2020 Presidential Election.
“I believe I won that election by many, many votes, many, many hundreds of thousands of votes,” he said. “That’s what I think.”
After the interview, Newsmax anchor Eric Bolling came back on camera with what Yahoo News called a “super awkward disclaimer.”
“All right, folks, now just to note: Newsmax has accepted the election results as legal and final,” he said.
https://news.yahoo.com/newsmax-ends-trump-interview-super-045703232.html
So the people and commentators most responsible for the Big Lie have acknowledged that Trump is lying when he says he won the 2020 Presidential Election.
Why then do so many people still believe Trump?
What do we know about Trump voters?
Well, they come from the worst-educated states and live in states where white supremacists are revising history textbooks.
They believe that the climate crisis, the COVID vaccine, the 2020 Presidential Election, and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection are hoaxes. They believe slavery was a jobs program, professional wrestling is real, and white males are being discriminated against.
They are easily duped and conned.
They disregard the fact that Trump is a pathological liar and a con man.
Fox News commentor Juan Williams wrote in The Hill newspaper that Trump “could be the most successful con artist man in American history.”
This conclusion is confirmed by other journalists, historians, judges, attorneys, and court cases over the last half-century.
This includes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maggie Haberman of The New York Times who wrote the book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/donald-trump-con-artist
A New York City jury found Trump and the Trump Organization guilty of criminal tax fraud. They were fined $335 million.
