Any interview with Donald Trump includes a number of false and dubious claims. Rarely, though, does Trump offer claims so dubious or so clearly false as one he made in his heavily hyped Fox Nation interview with Piers Morgan.
Trump does, in fact, talk about his allegations that the election was stolen constantly. He had a rally in Delaware, Ohio, over the weekend during which a reporter noted that he brought up the subject “multiple times.” There are myriad examples of his giving an impromptu speech at an event hosted at Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla., in which Trump suddenly starts riffing on the election results. It has been incessant in the nearly 540 days since the election occurred.
“The press hates to write about it, but that election was rigged and it was stolen,” Trump replied. “One hundred percent. I don’t mean a little bit.” After an aside drawing a tired and inaccurate comparison to Hillary Clinton’s complaints about the 2016 election, Trump added: “I have proof — and we have massive proof.”
What the publicly available True the Vote data shows is that some people may have been near drop-box locations on a given day, though without knowing the parameters for the data analysis, it’s hard to know how much credence to pay to the claims. They also have video surveillance of some drop boxes showing people inserting multiple ballots in a row — including in places like Wisconsin where collecting and submitting ballots was not illegal in 2020.
Bear in mind, this is also all recently emergent. True the Vote didn’t produce this data or the video back in January 2021, when the Capitol attack happened, and the group didn’t have it in November 2020, when Trump first started saying the election had been stolen. Not to mention before November 2020, when he said it would be stolen. It’s just the latest thing he can dangle to imply that something nefarious happened.
- On Nov. 6, 2020, Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller allegedly texted Meadows to point out that Trump did better in Philadelphia than he had four years prior, part of a national pattern of Trump overperforming in heavily Democratic urban areas. “Cuts hard against the urban vote stealing narrative,” Miller wrote.
- On Dec. 4, 2020, Jared Kushner allegedly texted Meadows a news article debunking the idea that ballots had been illicitly counted in Fulton County, Ga. Trump would nonetheless raise this same allegation a month later when haranguing Raffensperger to “find” him the votes he needed to declare victory.
- On Jan. 13, 2021, Miller allegedly sent Meadows poll data showing that even Trump’s supporters wanted him to move on from his fraud claims. “I tried to walk the President through this earlier but he won’t have any of it,” Miller wrote.
Those are just messages that we can assume reached Trump’s inner circle. There was a lot of other evidence across the board debunking each and every claim that Trump elevated. Far from the media withholding information, the media was robustly assessing and picking apart Trump’s claims. He just chose to ignore it. He just chose to constantly keep hyping the same false claim about the election, cycling in whatever evidence had not yet been debunked or, more accurately, whatever his supporters were most excited about.