The cycle of lies that drove the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection is again underway.
Five months before the 2024 election, claims that only fraud could explain a future Donald Trump defeat are already commonplace in the right-wing media ecosystem. Fox News stars and Trumpist influencers are priming their audiences to listen if Trump once again claims an election was “rigged” against him — and to come to his aid.
Twice last week, Greg Gutfeld told viewers of “The Five,” Fox News’ most-watched broadcast, that the public will only believe the 2024 results are legitimate if President Joe Biden loses.
“If they aren’t that worried that Joe’s going to lose, given his sorry state, what are they planning? What are they doing to save the day?” Gutfeld asked June 13. He added that if “by some weird, miraculous chance” Biden wins, “how do you convince anyone that’s real? Have they even thought of that?” He concluded, “Even the Dems behind the scenes better hope he doesn’t win because no one’s going to believe it.”
Gutfeld reiterated the point the next day, saying that if Democrats “somehow pull this out” by using “shenanigans” to win, “you’re going to deal with a public that doesn’t buy the election.”
That same week, Gutfeld’s colleague Jesse Watters used his prime-time show to call for banning ballot drop boxes on the grounds that they are “ripe for fraud” and to warn of millions of undocumented immigrants voting. “Biden let 10 million illegal immigrants into this country,” Watters claimed (falsely). “How are we ever going to accept the results of the election in this kind of landscape?”
This fear-mongering about the potential for election-changing fraud has been a consistent refrain all year on Fox News. “The Democrats are going to stop at nothing,” host Laura Ingraham declared in January. “If they can, they’re going to game the system or yeah, maybe even cheat.”
While the network paid a heavy price for its election denial in 2020 — including a $787.5 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems — its hosts are under constant pressure from other Trumpist competitors who loudly claim that Democratic election-rigging is an indisputable fact. “There are no ‘issues’ with the 2020 election — they stole it,” former Trump adviser and right-wing podcast host Steve Bannon claimed in March. “The only way they defeat Trump is to steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. He is unstoppable.”
Constant pressure from Bannon and Fox’s stable of stars have both helped to turn election denial from a common GOP view to a core party value. We saw four years ago that these disinformation campaigns can trigger horrific results. Trump’s plot to subvert the 2020 vote did not begin when he falsely declared victory in the hours after Election Day. By that point, the then-president and his right-wing media cronies had spent months preparing Republican voters not to accept a result that ended in his defeat. Outlets like Fox News relentlessly bombarded their audiences with misinformation about mail-in voting and election fraud. Trump in turn regularly promoted that bogus coverage, describing it as evidence that “Democrats are Rigging our 2020 Election!” In fact, Trump had previously offered similar predictions before the 2016 election, only for his unexpected victory to render the argument moot. Four years later, though, the Trumpist base had been carefully readied to reject the truth of a Trump loss, provide cover for Republican politicians to try to reverse the outcome in states Biden won, and march on the U.S. Capitol in his name. Trump’s election subversion effort failed, in part because Biden’s margin of victory was too large and in too many states, and in part because a handful of Republicans — notably his own vice president, Mike Pence — refused to participate. But November’s election may prove closer, and the allies of the former president — who still claims the 2020 results were “rigged” — have removed many of the guardrails that helped forestall his 2020 plot. Constant pressure from Bannon and Fox’s stable of stars have both helped to turn election denial from a common GOP view to a core party value, one that would-be leaders must espouse in order to climb the ranks. Anti-election-denial Republicans like Pence are party outcasts; those seeking to replace him on the ticket outbid each other over who can seem most skeptical of American elections and supportive of Trump’s 2020 scheme. The Jan. 6 riot has been re-envisioned as a peaceful tour by American martyrs and patriots. All this suits Trump’s aims perfectly. Mimicking his right-wing propagandists, Trump told Time magazine in April that the only thing that can prevent him from winning “in record-setting fashion” is if Democrats rely on “the things that they did the last time.” He warned that if that happens, political violence from his supporters may be on the table. In other words, Trump is ready for another Jan. 6-style assault on democracy if one proves necessary. And propagandists in the right-wing media are laying the groundwork to ensure his plot’s success.
Matt Gertz
Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive research center that monitors the U.S. media. His work focuses on the relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party, media ethics and news coverage of politics and elections. 
