MAGA Media Lap Up Trump’s Election-Interference Exaggerations
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the reactions from MAGA media to President Trump’s recent claims about election security, and we cover more media misses.
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Trump’s ‘Explosive’ Claims Require ‘Explosive’ Evidence
President Trump’s Thursday night address alleging a sweeping plot by foreign adversaries to interfere in the 2020 election — concealed by anti-Trump operatives in the “deep state” — was greeted with rapturous applause by segments of the MAGA media.
The president’s most ardent allies claimed his address was “explosive.”
“Trump Just EXPOSED Massive Election FRAUD on LIVE TV — This Just Changed EVERYTHING,” said right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson. “NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN all REFUSED to cover this. They know President Trump was right about election fraud from the beginning.”
Jack Posobiec went so far as to claim, “The Chinese attack on US sovereignty and democracy by sabotaging our elections is the worst attack on our country since 9/11.”
Laura Loomer, for her part, said, “China helped the Democrats steal the 2020 Presidential election so they could fast track the communist takeover over America! It’s time for people to go to jail!”
But even she questioned, ten minutes into the speech, if the president was sharing “new information.”
Loomer was right to hesitate.
In his prime time address Trump rehashed information that’s been in the public domain for years and misrepresented newly released government documents, which demonstrate real but measured concern about foreign threats among intelligence officials, but fall well short of providing evidence that our current system is hopelessly compromised.
Trump alleged that China carried out “the largest compromise of election data in history” and was able to obtain data from 220 million U.S. voter files, giving the CCP access to names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and “other sensitive data.”
But the information found in voter files is not particularly sensitive, nor secret. The identifying information is largely accessible to the general public.
Trump also dedicated significant time to revisiting a voter-fraud scheme in Michigan that made headlines at the time and was stopped before any fraudulent votes could be cast.
That didn’t stop Trump-friendly outlets from lapping up his version of events.
“Trump’s Declassified Docs Detail Massive Michigan Voter Registration Fraud,” The Federalist headlined its report about Trump’s speech, pulling out the claims as though they were a massive revelation.
“Mollie Hemingway was right. The 2020 election was rigged,” the story’s lede reads. It goes on to claim that Trump “walked through some of the more egregious attacks on election integrity and security in a 2020 election that government bureaucrats absurdly declared ‘the most secure in American history’” and that the president “brought the receipts.”
“Some of the more damning documents come from the FBI’s investigation into a leftist voter registration scheme in swing state Michigan, where Democrat Joe Biden, as he did in other battlegrounds, claimed a narrow victory. The declassified records offer a window into a massive voter registration fraud operation in Muskegon, Michigan, and a years-long investigation that tracked as many as 10,000 suspicious or forged registration forms submitted in the weeks before election. They also undercut the real Big Lie by Democrats and their accomplice media pals, that election administration in the 2020 election is beyond reproach,” the report adds.
However, investigators made the public aware of the probe at the time. A local clerk said hundreds of “irregular” applications had been caught, and no fraudulent votes or registrations were successful, a sign that the system was working as intended.
Trump claimed the areas of concern that he brought forth — the fraud in Michigan, the alleged Chinese interference, noncitizens on voter rolls, and the “deep state” cover up — “reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.”
He painted a grim picture:
Hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption. China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections. Evidence of fraud has been buried. Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.
And some — but not all — of his supporters ate it up.
“This is INSANE. Thank God President Trump’s Administration is getting to the bottom of this once and for all,” the House Republican Conference reacted.
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry said Trump had released “astonishing information” about China meddling in U.S. elections, while Breitbart Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle said the speech “was sobering, fact-filled, and laid out very serious vulnerabilities in our election systems that should have bipartisan support to fix.”
“At the very least, you could say that’s a coup d’état . . . at the most, you could say a conspiracy against the Constitution,” Epoch Times reporter Joshua Philipp said on One America News Network.
But the documents in many cases did not appear to support Trump’s lofty claims.
For example, the documents show that there is evidence that China tried to influence Americans to support the CCP and that Chinese leaders were in fact critical of Trump. But the assessments around China came from intelligence officers who said they had only low or medium confidence in their findings.
Trump went on to claim Americans have been lied to about the security of U.S. infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems.
“They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised and people within our government knew that,” he claimed, adding that at least one assessment claimed U.S. adversaries including China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea “have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.”
But the documents Trump released show people within his administration saying the exact opposite: that there’s no evidence that any foreign government was successful in actually changing votes, despite their efforts to gather information about U.S. elections.
Trump pointed to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s successful efforts to rig vote counts within his own country in 2020 as evidence that a regime can digitally alter vote totals “in ways that could not be detected even with an audit.”
However, the documents Trump released include a CIA analysis that found Venezuelan officials had “some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems” to influence the outcomes of races in their own country, but that the officials did not have the ability to change votes in other countries.
Trump explained his failure to confront these foreign and domestic threats ahead of the 2020 election by claiming that deep state actors conspired to keep information about the various election interference plots out of his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB).
The heavily redacted documents released by the White House do include several emails from intelligence officials expressing frustration that their views about foreign election interference were not being reflected in the PDB. But the PDB is a collaborative intelligence product, cobbled together out of a mountain of information gathered by several massive intelligence agencies. Agents and administration officials are constantly jockeying to get their preferred information into the brief — but because it’s meant to be consumed by a single person each day, it can only be so long.
These emails prove that there was a diversity of views within the first Trump administration regarding how seriously to take foreign election interference threats — but they fall well short of proving that left-wing extremists and foreign adversaries have compromised our election system under the protection of traitorous elements within our own government. Trump delivered his prime time address to convince his followers of that central claim, to convince them that they can’t trust our elections unless his pet piece of election-security legislation, the SAVE Act, passes. If, in the bargain, a significant portion of our country permanently loses faith in our democratic process as a result of Trump’s gambit, so be it.
While Trump’s most sycophantic supporters in the media lapped up his claims, some elected Republicans appear more circumspect: The New York Times reported that the speech largely landed with a “whimper among Republicans on Capitol Hill and in campaigns around the country.”
“If it was meant to influence people like me, it didn’t get me there,” Senator Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) told the outlet. “What we heard last night was there are foreign interests trying to influence us, but they weren’t effective at basically hacking into our system. I don’t think there was much last night that would change views on whether we should pass the SAVE Act.”
Fox News aired the speech in its entirety on Thursday night, but Fox & Friends avoided the topic in its Friday morning broadcast, instead discussing the war in Iran and wildfire smoke in Canada.
Headline Fail of the Week
Sally Quinn wrote for the New York Times, “It’s No Longer So Much Fun to Be MAGA in Washington.”
“The MAGA Republicans don’t seem to be having such a good time ransacking the place anymore.” They’re “in despair, fearful and losing hope,” her column claimed.
However, Quinn backs up her claims with evidence from . . . Democrats?
Quinn supports her “reporting” with the opinions of Democratic insider Steven Rattner; Democratic Senator Mark Warner; former judge and anti-Trump activist Mike Luttig; “the presidential historian Michael Beschloss, who from Day 1 of Mr. Trump’s first term warned of a potential dictatorship”; and liberal editor Leon Wieseltier.
NR’s Ramesh Ponnuru criticized the report on Monday, writing, “So Sally Quinn sensed a mood, and the Times hit ‘publish.’”
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Media Misses
- Former MSNBC anchor offered a distasteful, but unsurprising, response to the death of Senator Lindsey Graham last week, saying “hell opened its doors for at least one more.”“You sold your soul. You betrayed your friends, your legacy, your own soul. You sold your soul to the devil, and now you get to meet him in person,” she said on The Joy Reid Show.
- MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace recently said on her podcast that she stopped airing White House press briefings during Trump’s first term because it “actually hurt” her to watch then-Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “lying.”
