Photo via @oliverdarcy/Twitter
July 12, 2021, 1:52 pm
Somehow it’s CPAC season again, and as promised, Donald Trump was there as a key speaker at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, and he was up to his usual shenanigans. By that, we mean that he was repeating the same tired conspiracy theory lines about the 2020 election and the voter fraud he was never able to prove happened despite having the resources of an entire U.S. president at his disposal.
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It was bad enough that near-constant Trump toadying network Fox News had to put up a disclaimer on screen while he was talking on stage because they’ve already been sued for airing and repeating his lies about voting machines and the companies who own them.
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“The voting system companies have denied the various allegations made by President Trump and his counsel regarding the 2020 election,” the disclaimer read. According to Mediate, it was on screen for about 38 seconds, beginning when he inevitably started talking about how many votes he got in the election.
“And now, it’s also because I got more votes—75 million—than anybody in the history of the presidency, and far more than Clinton, far more than Obama, and a record 12 million more than 2016,” he falsely claimed, leaving out that Joe Biden got more votes than he did. “Think of it, in the history usually they go down a little bit second term and they win, but they go down a little bit.”
Trump is correct that most often an incumbent president gets fewer votes on his second run than in his first, largely due to the fact that fewer people vote in these elections because they’re typically less sensationalized than presidential elections with two new guys. Of course, in 2020, everything was different.
The Florida man has repeatedly tried to use the fact that he got more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016 as evidence that the election was rigged against him, but without real evidence, this has only convinced his die-hard fans. Joe Biden won the popular vote along with the electoral vote in 2020 with over 81 million total votes in his favor.
“And we were doing so well until the rigged election happened to come along,” Trump continued during his CPAC speech. “We were doing really well.”
Fox News has been hit with two billion-dollar defamation suits in 2021 for promoting Trump’s talking points on the election which accused two voting machine companies, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, of engaging in election fraud in Biden’s favor. As a result, the network has been forced to issue disclaimers and even silence people they brought on air in order to avoid further financial predicaments.
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Watching them have to do so over a speech by Trump himself was deeply satisfying for some of their critics.
Shouldn’t they also have these types of disclaimers during Tucker Carlson?
— Miss Kitty (@mysisterdaisy) July 11, 2021
*First Published: July 12, 2021, 1:52 pm
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