Tag: 2020 election

Fact-checking Trump’s cellphone rant of election falsehoods

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On Thanksgiving eve, President Trump called into a news conference held by his allies in a Gettysburg, Pa., hotel, yet again falsely claiming that Joe Biden stole the presidential election. The presidential rant lasted less than 10 minutes, but Trump still managed to squeeze in at least 15 false or misleading statements. Here’s a rundown of his falsehoods.

“This was an election that we won easily. … This election was rigged, and we can’t let that happen. We can’t let it happen for our country. … This election was lost by the Democrats. They cheated. It was a fraudulent election.”

Trump lost decisively, with Biden earning 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. That’s the same margin that Trump had when he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, in what he repeatedly called a “landslide.” Many key swing states have already certified the results, with Biden’s margin of victory in some key states significantly higher than Trump’s margin four years ago. For instance, Biden won Michigan by more than 150,000 votes, compared with Trump’s margin of about 11,000 in 2016. Continue reading.

Corporate Media Begin to Acknowledge GOP Coup Attempt

Even though President Donald Trump had telegraphed his intent months in advance to steal the 2020 election, by planning to get judges, state legislators and/or the Electoral College to illegitimately declare him the winner—laying out a pretext by lying about widespread voter fraud—corporate media were slow to accurately convey the reality and significance of Trump’s election theft efforts. I’ve noted twice before (FAIR.org, 9/15/20, 11/5/20) that corporate media betrayed their journalistic responsibilities by refusing to report, outside the context of opinion columns, that Trump has been attempting a coup, despite all the plain evidence.

Yet in the past few days, it seems corporate media have decided to report on Trump’s attempts to subvert the election and overturn its results as a fact, not as a matter of opinion. Here are some recent headlines:

  • Wall Street Journal (11/19/20): “Trump Broadens His Efforts to Overturn Election Outcome”
  • New York Times (11/19/20): “Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the Election Are Unparalleled in US History”
  • NPR (11/20/20): “The Growing Backlash Against Trump’s Efforts to Subvert the Election”
  • Associated Press (11/20/20): “Trump Tries to Leverage Power of Office to Subvert Biden Win”
  • Politico (11/21/20): “Trump Calls on GOP Legislatures to Overturn Election Results”
  • CNN (11/22/20): “Trump’s Attempt to Steal the Election Unravels as Coronavirus Cases Surge” Continue reading.

Trump is facing new debt collectors — and they’re coming from El Paso

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When President Donald Trump held a MAGA rally in El Paso in February 2019, it cost the West Texas city more than half a million dollars — and almost two years later, according to KTSM-TV (an NBC affiliate in El Paso), the city government is still trying to get Team Trump to cover those expenses.

KTSM’s Taniana Favela reports that El Paso City Councilman Peter Svarzbein, on Tuesday, said, “We all are seeing firsthand the struggles that everyday El Paso families have, in addition to the challenges that we have in our own budget. So, this amount of money is not inconsequential — and also, the message that we send that nobody is above the law is also an important one for our community to understand as well.”

El Paso is a Democrat-leaning city in a light red state that Trump carried by 6% in the 2020 presidential election. Although Texas on the whole leans Republican, its largest urban centers — including Houston, Austin and Dallas — lean Democrat. Nonetheless, Trump chose blue El Paso for a rally in February 2019. And that visit and event, according to KTSM, cost the city a total of $569,204.63. Continue reading.

Trump tweets string of falsehoods about Wisconsin absentee voters

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“ ‘In Wisconsin, somebody has to be indefinitely confined in order to vote absentee. In the past there were 20,000 people. This past election there were 120,000…and Republicans were locked out of the vote counting process.’ @VicToensing @newsmax”

— President Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 24, 2020

Every part of this is false, proving once again why none of Trump’s claims about election fraud should be given any credence.

As we’ve documented in recent fact checks, the statements from Trump and his lawyers are all absurd and easily debunked. Last week, it was Sidney Powell alleging with no evidencethat an algorithm from Venezuela had changed millions of Trump votes to votes for President-elect Joe Biden. This week, Rudolph W. Giuliani is mixing up Michigan and Minnesota to peddle a false claim about “phantom voters.”

Here, we have Victoria Toensing mangling pretty much everything about Wisconsin in a Newsmax interview and Trump repeating the disinformation to more than 88 million Twitter followers. (Twitter quickly flagged the tweet as misleading.) Continue reading.

Trump was baffled that Republicans won ‘all over’ while he lost: ‘I’m the only guy that loses?’

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President Donald Trump was reportedly befuddled that Republicans did so much better than him at the polls.

The anecdote was reported in an in-depth Politico story by Tim Alberta titled, “The Inside Story of Michigan’s Fake Voter Fraud Scandal.”

The story describes the White House meeting Trump held with Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey. Continue reading.

‘Flat-out sabotage’ as Mnuchin tries to put $455 billion in COVID funds out of Biden team’s reach

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Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is under fire for attempting to undermine the incoming Biden administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic on his way out the door after his department confirmed Tuesday that it intends to place $455 billion in unspent coronavirus relief funds into an account that requires congressional authorization to access.

Bloomberg reported that the funds, which Congress allocated to the Federal Reserve in March for emergency lending programs to assist local governments and struggling businesses, will be put in the Treasury Department’s General Fund following Mnuchin’s widely condemned decision last week to cut off the relief programs at the end of the year.

Mnuchin requested that the funds be reallocated by the currently divided Congress, and the Fed has agreed to cooperate with the outgoing treasury secretary’s move. Continue reading.

Trump Stress-Tested the Election System, and the Cracks Showed

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Even in the absence of a questionable outcome or any evidence of fraud, President Trump managed to freeze the passage of power for most of a month.

As President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election have steadily disintegrated, the country appears to have escaped a doomsday scenario in the campaign’s epilogue: Since Nov. 3, there have been no tanks in the streets or widespread civil unrest, no brazen intervention by the judiciary or a partisan state legislature. Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s obvious victory has withstood Mr. Trump’s peddling of conspiracy theories and his campaign of groundless lawsuits.

In the end — and the postelection standoff instigated by Mr. Trump and his party is truly nearing its end — the president’s attack on the election wheezed to an anticlimax. It was marked not by dangerous new political convulsions but by a letter from an obscure Trump-appointed bureaucrat, Emily W. Murphy of the General Services Administration, authorizing the process of formally handing over the government to Mr. Biden.

For now, the country appears to have avoided a ruinous breakdown of its electoral system. Continue reading.

Minnesota panel signs off on election results, says voting system clean

Simon finds “no credible allegations” of fraud in vote. 

Minnesota’s top election officials signed off on the results of this year’s vote on Tuesday, giving the state’s process a clean bill of health even as a group of Republicans filed a last-minute legal challenge.

“Our voting equipment is incredibly accurate and the postelection review in front of you proves that,” David Maeda, the state’s director of elections, told members of the five-person state canvassing board led by Secretary of State Steve Simon, which met to make official the outcome of the Nov. 3 vote.

Despite unprecedented challenges presented by the pandemic, Maeda reported that a random audit of precincts in all 87 counties failed to show a level of irregularities that would have, by law, triggered a full-county recount anywhere.

That’s never happened since the state began that form of post-election testing in 2006, Maeda added. Continue reading.

Pa. and Nevada certify Biden’s wins; president-elect introduces national security team

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NOTE: This article provided to all free of charge by The Washington Post.

Pennsylvania and Nevada, two key battleground states, certified President-elect Joe Biden’s wins Tuesday, even as President Trump continued to fight results in court and insisted that he will “never concede.”

Meanwhile, Biden introduced several foreign policy and national security picks at an event in Wilmington, Del., calling them a team that will “make us proud to be Americans.” Trump made a brief appearance at the White House to tout that the Dow Jones industrial average reached 30,000 points for the first time in history, and later for the annual pre-Thanksgiving turkey pardons. He took no questions at either event. View the post here.

The Memo: Trump election loss roils right

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President Trump’s loss in the 2020 election — and his continued attempts to pretend it didn’t happen — are throwing the Republican Party and the broader forces of conservatism into turmoil.

The split is between those who are maintaining loyalty toward Trump as he fights on, and those who are becoming more assertive about saying it’s all over.

On Monday, Trump suffered more setbacks. Continue reading.