How Journalists Fueled Trump's Big Lie
Conspiracy theories grew as reporters failed to confront the GOP with his history
After the election, Donald Trump could not contain his rage. The vote had been “a total sham” and “a travesty.” Machines had flipped votes from Republican to Democrat as part of a corporate conspiracy. The United States was “no longer a democracy,” he whined.
In one tweet, he called for Republicans to stop any effort to confirm the outcome. “"We can't let this happen,” he ranted. “We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.”
Ah, so familiar. But this is not from 2020. It’s 2012, and Senator mitt Romney - the candidate whom Trump supported - had lost to President Barack Obama. Trump, as he has done his entire life, could not admit that things failed to go his way. And so, he ranted that the election was a fraud, people voted illegally, the voting machines flipped the actual choices people made, and that there needed to be a swarm on people descending on Washington to force the outcome to be reversed.
This is coming up again because of the recent release of text messages to Mark Meadows, Trump’s last Chief of Staff, from scores of Republican politicians eager to find a way to overturn the election before Joe Biden could be sworn in as president. They all picked up Trump’s lies and sent it into a ridiculous outer space of conspiracy theories. While they kept quiet about the magnitude of their lunacy, all these people were making public comments about “the stolen election” without being confronted by reporters asking them to justify Trump’s lifetime of saying every loss he experienced was the result of fraud.
Those of us who knew Trump - I covered him for years, first meeting with him in 1987 - knew this, and knew exactly what would happen after the 2020 election: If he lost, he would rant that he won. This is what malignant narcissists do. He was experiencing a narcissistic meltdown - as he has at every point in his life when he lost - and only conspiracy theories could salve his wounded, fragile ego.
Even those closest to Trump knew what was coming if he did not win a second term. ““Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and longtime fixer, said in early 2019 during testimony before the House of Representatives Oversight Committee.
So that raises the big question: Where the hell is the media? When Trump began ranting about the “conspiracy” to deny him the election, so many Republicans joined in the Big Lie. Opportunists like Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, both joined in, along with a wide-range of seemingly unbalanced Republicans in Washington who seemed to accept any conspiracy theory - no matter how crazy - to justify the “stolen election” lie.
Not one reporter - not one - listened to Cruz oozing his claims about voter fraud without asking him the incredibly obvious question: “Trump says you engaged in fraud to steal votes from him during the 2016 primary. Do you agree with him on that too? And if not, why do you agree with these claims?”
Trump’s attacks on Cruz were not subtle. After the Texas Senator won the Iowa caucuses, Trump went into his narcissistic meltdown, declaring he could not possibly have lost. “"Ted Cruz didn't win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!" Trump wrote on Twitter at the time.
How to deal with that? How else? Declare Trump the winner or redo the vote. “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified," Trump tweeted.
How could reporters have stood by, never asking Cruz about this, when after the 2020 election, Trump was merely repeating the same lies he had spewed about the Senator’s victory in Iowa? The answers are few - maybe lazy, maybe ignorant, maybe afraid of losing access, maybe all of them. But there is no explanation that excuses reporters from doing their damn jobs. Instead, they stood by, letting the Big Lie take hold, and then expressing shock when the violence of the January 6 coup exploded.
Even when he won in 2016, Trump was so fragile that he could not accept his victory was not unanimous. He really won California that year, he whined, but millions of illegal aliens fraudulently voted for Hillary Clinton. While he lost New Hampshire, that was also fraud, he said. Instead, buses of people from Massachusetts traveled up I-93 so they could vote for Clinton and rob Trump of his obvious victory. He kept saying it, even as late as 2019 (although eventually he stopped openly blaming Massachusetts, perhaps because he believed he would win that state in 2020. “Thousands and thousands of people coming in from locations unknown (to vote in New Hampshire in 2016),” Trump said in a 2019 rally. “But I knew where the location was…We should have won New Hampshire. That was taken away.’’
This was nothing new. In high school - yes, high school - Trump felt certain he had aced an exam. When the tests came back, another student did better. A normal person would just assume the other student had, you know, done better. Not Trump. “He grew angry when a study partner scored higher on a chemistry test, even questioning whether he had cheated,” according to the book Trump Revealed by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher. His reality show The Apprentice never won an Emmy, so Trump declared the Emmys were rigged.
Trump even fought over the ridiculous. A Scottish farmer named Michael Forbes confronted Trump and led a fight to stop Trump’s efforts to build two golf courses and a luxury hotel in Aberdeen. As the confrontation raged on, Forbes joined Olympic athletes and international performers at Glenfiddich scotch's “Spirit of Scotland Awards,” and won the elected award as “Top Scot.”
The future president reacted as any lunatic would. He banned Glenfiddich scotch from all his properties. A Twitter user tweaked Trump on twitter, calling him “a bit thick” since the award was a popular vote and not a decision made by the liquor company. Trump had to have “been told plenty times now that the Scottish public voted for Michael Forbes,” the tweeter told Trump.
Nope. It was all fraud, Trump declared - the real winner was a tennis player he supported, Andy Murray. “Dopey,” Trump replied to the tweeter who was teasing him. “Same people voting over & over again? Andy Murray #1 by far.”
In other words, anyone who didn’t know that Trump was going to scream “fraud” if he lost the 2020 election knew nothing about his history.
But Republicans simply accepted that their God King had divined some top-secret information proving fraud and did not instead suffer from a severe personality disorder that made it impossible for him to admit defeat.
Among 2,319 text messages sent to Chief of Staff Meadows were assorted nutty ones that started off accepting Trump’s Big Lie, and from there spun deep into conspiracy theories. “I just got off the phone with a high-ranking government official and decorated JAG Officer,” texted Rep. Rick Allen (R-GA) in a series of messages first reported by Talking Points Memo. “He revealed some things to me that the President needs to know. The FBI and DOJ are slow walking these investigations into voter fraud in Georgia…My source confirmed that there is widespread fraud in multiple states! Let me know a good time to talk, thanks!”
It went on from there. “The source that is feeding my source some voter fraud information contacted me directly,’’ Allen texted. “They sent it to me and it is mostly Data breeches of drivers’ licenses in Georgia and Texas and probably all the swing states that can be used to commit voter fraud. I am going through it now…It is wild stuff! Waiting to hear back from my source to set up a time to talk tomorrow.”
Of course, none of that happened. But it gets worse. “From what I can tell so far looks like this is high tech and foreign governments in collusion with Democratic Party to guarantee Biden would win,’’ Allen texted.
Then he revealed his source, which was just a pair of internet links. One was a news story a 2005 data breach involving Georgia driver’s license records. The second was a YouTube video from an anti-vaccine activist who interviewed some guy who claimed to be an ex-intelligence operative. With no evidence, the “operative” declared that a foreign government had stolen the identities of 50 million American citizens - a huge percentage of the voting public - and used them for voting in 2020 as part of a “$100 billion” plot involving illegal immigrants, blackmail, and Romanian officials.
Seriously, this an elected official communicating with the White House.
Allen wasn’t the only wackadoodle to turn up in texts to Meadows. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) simply declared his hatred of America by saying democracy had to be ended. “Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall (sic) Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!”
Another anti-American legislator urged drastic action. Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) texted, “When we lose Trump we lose our Republic. Fight like hell and find a way. We’re with you down here in Texas and refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship.”
According to Talking Points Memo, Republican members of Congress texted Meadows at least 364 messages to discuss plans to overthrow the election. Babin summed up the plot to deny Biden the presidency on January 6. “Many of us as Republican House members want to help the President in any way we can to prevent the outright theft of this presidential election,’’ he wrote.
As all of this was going on, fake electors were being set up in various swing states, the Trump Administration was refusing to allow for standard transition operations - leaving this country at risk of a major intelligence failure in the early days of the Biden Administration - and Trump was turning over the White House to kooks like lawyer Sidney Powell and pillow magnate Mike Lindell.
Reporters were treating this all like a lark. What sane person, after all, could take all these conspiracy theories seriously? It was no different than their refusal to treat Trump as a real candidate in 2016, allowing him to skate by with little investigation while news organizations delved endlessly into the nothingburger “email scandal” of Clinton. Make no mistake, reporter laziness or ignorance or refusal to do their jobs brought us Donald Trump in 2016 and almost cost America its democracy.
And even now, in the aftermath of the poor GOP showing in the midterms, reporters are ignoring one of the greatest moments that underscores how dangerous and ill Trump is, and the long-term threat he poses to our country. Just before the election, in an interview with the wildly MAGA and ratings challenged NewsNation, Trump declared of the Republicans running in the midterms, “If they win, I should get all of the credit, and if they lose, I should not be blamed at all,”
A pure narcissist. But not a single reporter has confronted Republicans on Capitol Hill even on these words. Instead, it was all a laugh. Just like 2016, just like the Big Lie claims after the 2020 election. Somehow, these laughs all become threats to our country. And unfortunately, it still seems that the American media is not up to the task of facing that reality.