Yes, it would have been preferable if Rep. Liz Cheney had managed to find a way to move on past endless re-litigating of the 2020 election results. If a House Republican leader chooses to respond to every statement that Trump makes contending the election was stolen and that he is the rightful winner of the 2020 election, she will spend almost every week doing so, and the GOP will never move on to the issues and challenges of the here and now.
But there’s no getting around the fact that the problem starts with Donald Trump continuing to insist the 2020 election results are a “hoax,” and that he won the 2020 election. This weekend in North Carolina, the former president offered old whine in new bottles:
There’s no better example of the Democrat and media corruption than the 2020 election hoax. As you know, the evidence is too voluminous to even mention. All you have to do is read the article in Time magazine, cover story in Time magazine. I’m not a big fan, I was on the cover a lot, perhaps a record, a lot. I got to a point if I was ever on the cover, I was on the cover of Time magazine before I did this political thing and I read every word. I said, I wonder what that means. It was actually a very good story, I used to actually get good press, can you believe it? I guess that’s how I got to be president when you think about it. But I used to get great press. But Time magazine did a story. They couldn’t help themselves. They had to brag about what they did in November. They had to brag and that story just goes 25% of the way.
But if you take it a little bit further, you’ll just read that and you see how corrupt, but that’s the least of it. You look at what happened on that evening when the election was won and all of a sudden vast amounts of votes were taken in just in certain states, swing states. Swing states that I was leading by a lot. Then all of a sudden, oh, something happened. It was a disgrace to our country and if you think people don’t see it, people see it. People have seen it. The 2020 presidential election, that election, the 2020 presidential election was by far the most corrupt election in the history of our country. There’s never been anything like this. They used COVID and they used the mail-in ballots to steal an election. It was the third world country election like we’ve never seen before. Look at what took place.
The Time magazine article that Trump is referring to is “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” by Molly Ball February 4, and it can be read here. The headline is pretty hyperbolic, considering how the “shadow campaign” consisted of Zoom calls among mostly but not entirely liberal groups coordinating efforts to minimize pandemic-related disruptions to voting, informing voters about how their voting process in 2020 might be different from their experiences in the past, pressuring social media platforms to remove “disinformation,” and informing the public that because of mail-in ballots, tallying the vote might take longer than in past years. One can support or vehemently oppose the efforts of these groups, but they do not amount to a confession of altering, removing votes or generating fraudulent ones. Ball’s article reads a lot more like liberal activist groups elbowing each other out of the way to take credit for Biden’s victory.
Lawsuits from the Trump campaign and its allies alleging electoral fraud, mismanagement of ballots and other improprieties were rejected or withdrawn in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and at the Supreme Court, more than once. Sometimes the Trump campaign arguments were rejected by Trump-appointed judges. Sidney Powell offered some of the most outlandish and incredible claims of far-reaching election skullduggery; by March, Powell’s defense lawyers were arguing in a defamation suit that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact.”