The ruling class did everything in their power to make sure what happened in 2016 — a Donald Trump election victory — would never happen again in 2020.
If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated for their rhetoric following the 2016 election. In fact, the last time they accepted the legitimacy of a presidential election they lost was in 1988.
After the 2000 election, which hinged on the results of a recount in Florida, Democrats smeared President George W. Bush as “selected, not elected.” When Bush won re-election against then-Sen. John Kerry in 2004, many on the left claimed that voting machines in Ohio had been rigged to deliver fraudulent votes to Bush. HBO even produced and aired “Hacking Democracy,” a documentary that added fuel to the conspiracy theory fire of conversations about the 2004 results. But nothing holds a candle to what happened in 2016 after Donald Trump’s surprising defeat of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Rather than accept that Trump won and Clinton lost, the political and media establishments desperately sought to explain away Trump’s victory. What they settled on was a destructive conspiracy theory that crippled the government, empowered America’s adversaries, and illegally targeted innocent private citizens whose only crime was not supporting Hillary Clinton.
With baseless claims of hacked voting totals, illegal voter suppression, and extensive media manipulation, the Russian collusion hoax had it all. But more than anything, the belief that Trump stole the 2016 election had the support of the most powerful institutions, individuals, and even government agencies in the country.
“You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,” Clinton told her followers in 2019.
“I know he’s an illegitimate president,” Clinton claimed of Trump a few months later. She even claimed during an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” that “voter suppression and voter purging and hacking” were why she lost.
Former President Jimmy Carter agreed.
“[Trump] lost the election and was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf,” he told NPR in 2019. “Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016.”
Their view was widely shared by most prominent Democrats in Congress. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, for example, said he was skipping Trump’s inauguration in 2016 because he believed Trump was illegitimate, and that “the Russians participated in helping this man get elected.” Lewis also skipped the inauguration of President George W. Bush, claiming that Bush, too, was an illegitimate president.
A few members of Congress joined him in 2001. In 2017, one out of every three Democrats in the U.S. House boycotted Trump’s inauguration. Many said they refused to take part in the installation of an illegitimate president.
Not only did corporate media not condemn leading Democrats’ refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election, the media were also super spreaders of wild conspiracy theories about how Trump and Russia colluded to steal the election from Clinton. They dutifully regurgitated false leaks from corrupt intelligence officials suggesting that Trump and his staff had committed treason. They ran stories suggesting that Republicans who didn’t support their conspiracy theory were insufficiently loyal to the country.
Some even suggested Russia may have hacked voting machines and vote totals in a bid to steal the election from Clinton. It was all nonsense. Even Robert Mueller, who ran a multi-year and multi-million-dollar government investigation into claims that Trump personally colluded with...
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