Bluesky

Surprisingly, there are some lies so outrageous that even Sean Hannity is reluctant to endorse them. 

As expected, Donald Trump’s address to the nation on Thursday night was a farrago of nonsense promoting his conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Trump has been pushing this lie since the moment he lost that race, and, as his latest speech showed, even his victory in 2024 wasn’t enough to stop him from trying to rig American election laws to favor the Republican Party.

The speech was long on claims of shadowy conspiracies by China and the Deep State and short on actual evidence. While Trump presented China as the main threat, he also alluded to possible election hacks by North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela. None of these claims was credible.

In fact, the speech was so disgracefully packed with lies that even some of the president’s most loyal lapdogs decided to keep their distance from it. Before the speech, Republican officials were already leaking to Politico their concern that Trump was wasting his time rehashing conspiracy theories that appeal to the base rather than offering a positive economic message that would win over moderate voters in the midterms.

Fox News was even more cautious, as The New York Times reports:

Fox News, which paid $787 million to settle a defamation suit over false statements about the 2020 election, took a careful approach in covering Trump’s remarks. Sean Hannity, a Trump ally, said that the president’s claims were “pretty remarkable,” but was careful not to endorse Trump’s allegations. “I’m sure anybody that cares about truth will want to do a deep dive into all of this,” Hannity told viewers.

A Fox News correspondent, Aishah Hasnie, then stated bluntly on-air that the network “is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statements and claims at this time.”

The lukewarm response from flunkies like that is telling. They were right to want nothing to do with the speech.

Trump’s allegations added up to virtually nothing. One of the incendiary claims he made was that “raw intelligence obtained by the F.B.I. in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that Chinese activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.” But as the Times notes, this “raw intelligence” stems from a tip sent to the FBI by someone with no direct knowledge of the claims being made (a “sub source,” in the lingo of law enforcement). Further, “more senior agents questioned whether the source, who was new, was getting good information or random, erroneous gossip.” One reason to be suspicious of this “sub source” was that they also claimed the Chinese government was operating underground military bases in the United States spreading Covid. 

Reporters from outlets such as the Times and The Bulwark are doing the necessary but tedious work of fact-checking Trump’s lies. But the main objection to the speech was well made by Senator Mark Warner, who stated:

Trump’s shocking “bombshells” about China are totally bogus. The fact is our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that China did not even try to change a single vote in the 2020 election. A single concurring opinion suggested China may have tried to sway voters’ opinions… but that’s been public knowledge since 2021.

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Maverick Republican Congressman Thomas Massie made a similar objection in more colorful terms, telling MS NOW:  “I don’t think the problem is that our elections aren’t secure because we control the House, Senate, White House, and to some degree we control the Supreme Court. So I ask my Republican colleagues, why are you complaining about election fraud? We won all the damn elections!” 

The speech is unlikely to convince anyone who is not already a MAGA diehard. Aside from the fact that Fox News was visibly trying to keep a distance, it was not carried live by ABC, NBC, or CNN. CNN’s Kaitlin Collins offered a perfectly rational explanation for not running the speech: “We’ll be monitoring what the president says tonight, as we always do, but aren’t taking it live, given the president has a well-documented history of saying blatantly false things about elections.” True to form, Trump ranted against two of these networks in the speech, threatening to revoke the licences of ABC and NBC.