Given Russia’s efforts to interfere in the United States’ 2016 presidential election, officials were on high alert during the 2020 race for similar tactics. With this in mind, when The New York Post published a notorious report on Hunter Biden’s laptop during the race four years ago, U.S. agencies suspected it was Russian misinformation. So did social media giants, which temporarily limited access to the story.
Facebook was among the tech companies that acted, and Mark Zuckerberg has long said he wished his company had handled the matter differently. The CEO reiterated that point in correspondence this week with Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.
Donald Trump apparently found all of this significant anew and published this missive to his own social media platform.
“Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED. FoxNews, New York Post, Rep. Laurel Lee, House Judiciary Committee.
For readers interested in punctuation and grammatical rules, I’d note that the former president’s rant started with quotation marks, but there was no end-quote. I’ve long since stopped trying to understand his idiosyncratic approach to the language.
Nevertheless, as is often the case, Trump probably saw a headline or two, failed to grasp the relevant facts, and published some online hysterics that didn’t really make any sense. But of particular interest was a pertinent detail the GOP candidate overlooked: He was president in 2020, not Joe Biden.
Look at the rant again: To hear Trump tell it, “the White House” was responsible for trying to suppress a controversial report, which in his mind, necessarily meant that the 2020 election was “rigged.”
But in light of the fact that we’re talking about events that unfolded in 2020, he was referring to his own White House.
It’s striking how often this comes up with Republicans. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia last year blamed the Biden administration’s policies for a Michigan woman whose sons died in 2020 — when Biden was a private citizen and Trump was president.
Months later, Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas blamed Biden for “paying people to stay home” in 2020, referring to a law that Trump signed into law. The same week, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado blamed the Democratic president for Covid-related school closures in 2020 — which, again, was a year that Biden spent campaigning, not in the Oval Office. It also wasn’t too long ago when former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany pointed to crime data from 2020 to blame Biden for the U.S. murder rate, apparently unaware that it was her former boss who was president at the time. More recently, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody took aim at the Biden administration’s approach to criminal justice protests in 2020 — when there was no Biden administration. Evidently, Trump is equally forgetful. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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