Trump Hijacks Primetime TV to Peddle Crackpot Voting Claims
Donald Trump will deliver a primetime television address this week on the 2020 presidential election, which he lost but still can’t accept.
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Trump, 80, announced on Truth Social—in the third person—that he will speak to the nation at 9 p.m. Thursday night. He provided no details about his speech, but, according to MS NOW White House reporter Jake Traylor, its content would apparently be new updates about an old grievance.
Trump will cover “newly declassified intelligence reports that the White House asserts reveal plans by foreign nations to interfere in the 2020 election,” Traylor reported.
The White House did not immediately respond to a Daily Beast inquiry about the nature of Trump’s comments.
It was also unclear whether Trump would be referring to some or all of the countries that U.S. intelligence officials have already said had a role in interfering in that year’s election.
Russian actors, for instance, tried to damage Joe Biden’s reputation by pushing baseless allegations about the then-candidate to “U.S. media organizations, U.S. officials, and prominent U.S. individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration,” a March 2021 analysis by the U.S. Intelligence Community found.
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Additionally, Iranian-linked hackers unsuccessfully targeted Trump’s campaign in August and September 2019, Reuters reported.
A Trump administration official also warned in June of that year that China was trying to manipulate public opinion.
Trump’s refusal to admit he lost to Biden in 2020 spurred many baseless theories from himself and his MAGA allies. One involved a country that hasn’t officially been deemed a bad actor in that year’s election: Venezuela.
Former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, in his costly attacks on Dominion Voting Systems, asserted falsely that the company’s software manipulated vote counts and was created by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, with influence from China. Giuliani, 82, was later disbarred for his election lies.
Whichever countries come up on Thursday, Trump, who was impeached for trying to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to damage Biden’s 2020 campaign, will surely continue to embrace election denialism.
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