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No, Trump Hasn't Stopped Lying About The 'Rigged' 2020 Election

No, Trump Hasn't Stopped Lying About The 'Rigged' 2020 Election

Axios is attempting to manufacture a narrative in which Donald Trump has become more disciplined, substituting “vague insinuations” that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” against him for the explicit false claims of a “stolen” election that have marked the former president’s rhetoric since November 2020. The piece falls flat for a number of reasons, including that Trump used the explicit “rigged” rhetoric in several of the speeches Axios cited.

Trump tried to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election. His slew of lies and conspiracy theories about widespread fraud failed to sway the courts, but riled his supporters to the point that a mob he summoned to Washington, D.C., stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to prevent the transition of power. His continued insistence that the election had been rigged against him and that he was right to try to remain in power poses a threat to American democracy.

Trump’s incendiary rhetoric also poses a threat to his 2024 campaign — the majority of Americans recognize that President Joe Biden was the legitimate victor in 2020, and exit polls reveal Trump’s weakness in GOP primaries with the minority of the party that agrees. Ideally, from the standpoint of Trump’s campaign staff, their candidate would stop saying that he actually won the 2020 election. Failing that, it would be helpful if they could somehow convince reporters to claim that he had stopped. But who could possibly be that credulous?

Axios filled that void on Monday morning with a story pointing to “some early success” for Trump advisers who are trying to get their candidate to “focus … less on old grievances and personal drama.” As evidence of that thesis, the publication claimed: “In some recent speeches, Trump has avoided his typical complaint that the 2020 election he lost was ‘stolen’ — and instead has said, ‘We were interrupted,’ or ‘something very bad happened.’”

Every attendee at a Trump rally — and Axios’ journalists —- know what Trump means when he says “something very bad happened” during the vote count. For Axios to give Trump credit for increased discipline on the grounds that he is substituting vague, false insinuations of a stolen election for explicit, false claims of a stolen election is a sign that the bar it has set for Trump is absurdly low.

But Trump still hasn’t actually cleared that bar.

The Axios piece lists six examples of Trump using the alternative rhetoric in speeches since late January — but at least three of those speeches also included the “typical complaint” of a stolen election Axios claimed he had avoided.

Axios cited a January 22 speech in New Hampshire, in which Trump said of his domestic policy goals, “We almost had it done until we were interrupted.”

  • But in the same speech, he described the 2020 election as “rigged” at least seven times, including saying, “It was a rigged election. And for challenging [the] election, they indict you.”

The piece pointed to a January 29 speech in Nevada, in which Trump claimed that “We did much better in 2020 ... but something happened.”

  • In the same speech, he repeatedly claimed the election was “rigged,” including saying that “we actually caught it and it was rigged and it was stolen.”

A third case is Trump’s statement at a February 12 rally in South Carolina, “A bad thing happened. Bad things.”

  • In the same speech, he said: “The radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we're not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.”

Additionally, Axios cited as a fourth example Trump saying at a border event on Thursday, “We did much better in 2020 than we ever even thought about doing in 2016 ... (but) very bad things happened.”

  • While Axios used this to show that Trump had pulled back on his explicit language of a “rigged” election, Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto responded by saying, “He still lost that election. That is not in doubt anymore."

Axios included a “reality check” note that Trump had used “rigged” language in his February speech at CPAC — but such language has remained a staple of his speeches throughout the period the publication examined.

Indeed, at a rally on Saturday, Trump said: “Did you ever notice they go after the people that want to find out where the cheating was — and, by the way, 82 percent of the country understands that it was a rigged election, OK? You can’t have a country with that.”

The week before, he gave a speech so replete with 2020 election lies that the lawsuit-averse Newsmax felt it was necessary to have its host follow Trump’s remarks by reading the following disclaimer: “The [former] president mentioned in his speech the 2020 elections. Newsmax as a network believes the results were legal and final.”

Reporters have spent the last eight years telling their audiences that a Trump “pivot” was around the corner. That they’ve been wrong every single time before does not seem to keep these pieces from getting written on the thinnest possible grounds.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

What’s Partisan About Fact?

What’s Partisan About Fact?

“Obama is a Muslim,” it said. “That is a FACT.”

As best I can recall — my computer ate the email — that was how the key line went in a reader missive that had me doing a double take last week. It was not the outlandish assertion that struck me but, rather, the emphatic claim of its veracity. We’re talking Shift-Lock and all-caps so there would be no mistaking: “Obama is a Muslim. That is a FACT.”

Actually, it is not a fact, but let that slide. We’re not here to renew the tired debate over Barack Obama’s religion. No, we’re only here to lament that so many of us seem to know “facts” that aren’t and that one party — guess which — has cynically nurtured, used and manipulated this ignorance for political gain.

Consider a recent trio of studies testing the effectiveness of fact-checking journalism. They were conducted for the nonpartisan American Press Institute, and their findings actually offer good news for those of us who fret over the deterioration of critical thinking and the resultant incoherence of political debate.

Researchers found, for instance that, although still relatively rare, fact-checking journalism has been growing fast and saw a 300 percent rise between 2008 and 2012. Also: Most Americans (better than 8 in 10) have a favorable view of political fact checking. Best of all, exposure to fact checking tends to increase respondents’ knowledge, according to the research.

But like stinkweed in a bouquet of roses, the studies also produced one jarringly discordant finding: Republicans are significantly less likely to view fact checkers favorably. Among those with lower levels of political knowledge, the difference between Republican and Democratic voters is fairly small — 29 percent of Republicans have a favorable view, versus 36 percent of Democrats. Surprisingly, among those with higher levels of knowledge, the gap is vast: 34 percent of Republicans against 59 percent of Democrats.

The traditional rejoinder of the GOP faithful whenever you bring up such disparities in perception is that they mistrust “mainstream media” because it is biased against them. Putting aside the dubious validity of the claim, it’s irrelevant here. Fact-checking journalism is nonpartisan. One would be hard pressed, for example, to paint PolitiFact as a shill for the donkey party, given that it regularly dings Democrats and gave President Obama (“If you like your health plan, you can keep it”) its uncoveted Lie Of the Year award for 2013.

That being the case, one can’t help but be disheartened by this gap. What’s not to like about journalism that sorts truth from falsehood? What’s partisan about fact?

Nothing — you’d think. Except that for Republicans, something obviously is.

Perhaps we ought not be surprised., given the pattern of party politics in recent years. On topics as varied as climate change, health care, terrorism, and the president’s birthplace, GOP leaders and media figures have obfuscated and prevaricated with masterly panache, sowing confusion in the midst of absolute clarity, pretending controversy where there is none, and finding, always, a ready audience of the fearful and easily gulled.

As political strategy, it has been undeniably effective, mobilizing voters, and energizing campaigns. As a vehicle for leadership and change, it has been something else altogether. When you throw away a regard for fact, you throw away the ability to have effective discourse. Which is why American political debates tend to be high in volume and low in content. And why consensus becomes impossible.

The API statistics documenting the lack of GOP enthusiasm for fact checkers, ought to tell you something. Who could have a problem with a fact checker? He or she is your best friend if what you’re saying is true.

You would only feel differently if what you’re saying is not.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.). (

Photo: Fibonacci Blue via Flickr

Caught In A Lie? Maybe Oxytocin Is To Blame

Caught In A Lie? Maybe Oxytocin Is To Blame

By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — There are lies, damn lies — and the lies that we tell for the sake of others when we are under the influence of oxytocin.

Researchers found that after a squirt of the so-called love hormone, volunteers lied more readily about their results in a game in order to benefit their team. Compared with control subjects who were given a placebo, those on oxytocin told more extreme lies and told them with less hesitation, according to a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Oxytocin is a brain hormone that is probably best known for its role in helping mothers bond with their newborns. In recent years, scientists have been examining its role in monogamy and in strengthening trust and empathy in social groups.

Sometimes, doing what’s good for the group requires lying. (Think of parents who fake their addresses to get their kids into a better school.) A pair of researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and the University of Amsterdam figured that oxytocin would play a role in this type of behavior, so they set up a series of experiments to test their hypothesis.

The researchers designed a simple computer game that asked players to predict whether a virtual coin toss would wind up heads or tails. After seeing the outcome on a computer screen, players were asked to report whether their prediction was correct or not. In some cases, making the right prediction would earn a player’s team a small payment (the equivalent of about 40 cents). In other cases, a correct prediction would cost the team the same amount, and sometimes there was no payoff or cost.

In the first round, 60 healthy men sprayed either a small dose of oxytocin or a placebo into their noses 30 minutes before playing the game. As expected, men in both groups cheated — but the men who had taken the oxytocin cheated more.

By definition, anyone’s coin-toss predictions should be correct 50 percent of the time, on average. But the players on oxytocin said they made the right prediction 79.7 percent of the time, as did 66.7 percent of the players on the placebo.

What’s more, players on the hormone reported on the accuracy of their predictions in an average of 2.22 seconds. That was significantly faster than the players on the placebo, who took 2.86 seconds to decide what to tell the researchers. Apparently, the decision to lie to benefit the group required less deliberation than the decision to tell a self-serving lie.

In cases where correct predictions led to either no gain or a loss, oxytocin didn’t seem to induce players to lie any more than they would have otherwise, the researchers found.

In the next round of the experiment, the rules of the game were basically the same except that the gains (and losses) were kept by the players, not shared with a team. In that case, there was no difference in lying, truth-telling or response time based on whether players got oxytocin or the placebo. The study authors interpreted that as evidence that oxytocin influences only group dynamics, not individual behavior.

The researchers paid special attention to cases of “extreme” lying — players who said nine of their 10 predictions were correct. In truth, people should do that well only 1 percent of the time. But in the game, 53 percent of the men who got oxytocin said they went nine for 10 when they were playing for a team. Not only was that higher than the 23 percent of men who told the same whopper after getting the placebo, it was also higher than the 33 percent of men who told that lie under the influence of oxytocin when they were playing only for themselves.

“When dishonesty serves group interests, oxytocin increased lying as well as extreme lying,” the researchers concluded. “When lying served personal self-interests only, oxytocin had no effects.”

Photo: Monash University via Flickr

The Republican Party Lies More Than Democrats, Study Finds

The Republican Party Lies More Than Democrats, Study Finds

According to a new study from the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, Republicans are significantly more likely to lie than Democrats — and the gap is widening as President Barack Obama spends more time in office.

The study examined how Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-check site PolitiFact.com rated 100 statements involving factual claims from the first four months of President Obama’s second term — 46 of the claims were made by Democrats, and 54 were made by Republicans.

CMPA found that PolitiFact rated 32 percent of the Republican claims as “false” or “pants on fire,” compared to just 11 percent of the Democratic claims. Along the same lines, PolitiFact rated just 11 percent of the Republican statements as “entirely true,” compared to 22 percent of the Democratic statements.

Just 18 percent of the Republican claims were rated as “mostly” or entirely true, compared to 54 percent of the Democratic claims. Conversely, 52 percent of the Republican statements were rated as mostly or entirely false, while just 24 percent of Democratic statements received the same designation.

In other words, as CMPA President Dr. Robert Lichter put it: “While Republicans see a credibility gap in the Obama administration, PolitiFact rates Republicans as the less credible party.”

Notably, the credibility gap seems to be growing with time. In May, as Republicans have obsessively tried to tie the president to a series of scandals, their percentage of false claims has risen to 60 percent.

PolitiFact editor Bill Adair responded to the study in an email to Politico’s Dylan Byers:

PolitiFact rates the factual accuracy of specific claims; we do not seek to measure which party tells more falsehoods.

The authors of this press release seem to have counted up a small number of our Truth-O-Meter ratings over a few months, and then drew their own conclusions.

We’ve rated more than 7,000 statements since we started in 2007. We are journalists, not social scientists. We select statements to fact-check based on our news judgment — whether a statement is timely, provocative, whether it’s been repeated and whether readers would wonder if it is true.

You can read the full results of the CMPA study here.