President Donald Trump has shown no indication of any willingness to admit to the breadth of his lies anytime soon. He’s spent the aftermath of Election Day claiming that systematic fraud plagued the process, but there’s no meaningful evidence for this claim. The Department of Homeland Security, Attorney General Bill Barr, and local election officials of both major parties around the country have confirmed that there’s simply no meaningful evidence of systematic fraud. Possibly responding to some hesitation on the part of credible news organizations to give uninterrupted airtime to his election lies, Trump yelled on Twitter on Friday that the “only thing more RIGGED than the 2020 Presidential Election is the FAKE NEWS SUPPRESSED MEDIA.”
Trump tweeted the following message on Friday:
‘The only thing more RIGGED than the 2020 Presidential Election is the FAKE NEWS SUPPRESSED MEDIA. No matter how big or important the story, if it is even slightly positive for “us”, or negative for “them”, it will not be reported!’
The only thing more RIGGED than the 2020 Presidential Election is the FAKE NEWS SUPPRESSED MEDIA. No matter how big or important the story, if it is even slightly positive for “us”, or negative for “them”, it will not be reported!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2020
Trump is simply incorrect. There is no meaningfully conclusive evidence of any kind of conspiracy among news organizations to suppress stories that might make Trump and his allies look good. There’s no media blackout effort targeting certain swathes of stories, and claims to the contrary are simply not grounded in facts.
Media organizations have amply covered the race to produce a COVID-19 vaccine, which the Trump administration has financially supported, a step that could, arguably, make the current White House look good (or at least not as bad as it could). News organizations have covered the rises and falls in the job and stock markets. On the flip side, they’ve shied away from covering Trump’s claims that the election was rigged and that the COVID-19 crisis might not be that bad because these claims are false. Basic fact-checking is not some global conspiracy against Donald Trump in particular.
On Friday, among other retweets, Trump also retweeted one of his own messages stating that the “best way to insure a [Kelly Loeffler] and [David Perdue] VICTORY is to allow signature checks in the Presidential race, which will insure a Georgia Presidential win.” His claim that a signature check would reveal enough invalid ballots to hand him a win in Georgia is false — a signature check for mail-in ballots in the presidential race has already been completed. A meaningful re-check is not physically possible, because after initial verification, envelopes (with signatures) and ballots are separated.
Check out Trump’s posts below:
