After Donald Trump lost his reelection bid five years ago, he immediately launched an effort not only to overturn the results, but also to convince the public that he secretly won, reality be damned. There was, however, one key element missing from the president’s pitch: evidence.
Trump asked his 2020 campaign team to produce evidence to bolster his conspiracy theories, but they didn’t because they couldn’t. He asked his lawyers to do the same thing, but to no avail.
Unsatisfied, the Republican hired the Berkeley Research Group to uncover widespread voter fraud and election irregularities, which did not go well, and then he hired Simpatico Software Systems, which also failed to tell Trump what he wanted to hear.
In the months and years that followed, the then-former president would occasionally promise to share “irrefutable” and “conclusive” evidence, but those vows inevitably turned into embarrassing flops. (Shortly before Election Day 2024, Trump said he had “many different papers” to substantiate his nonsensical claims, but for reasons he never explained, those “papers” never reached the public.)
But as the first year of the incumbent president’s second term nears its end, he’s still confident that he’ll produce the evidence that’s eluded him.
When Politico’s Dasha Burns sat down with Trump this week for a lengthy interview, she tried to get a better sense of his views on Russia’s war in Ukraine. This, sadly, led the president to say what he always says when asked about the devastating conflict: Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have launched the invasion if he had been in office, and Trump wasn’t in office because there was, as he once again falsely described it, “a rigged election.”
In this interview, however, the Republican added, as part of his stale and predictable harangue, “It’s gonna come out over the next couple months too, loud and clear. Because we have all the information.”
For reality-based observers, the proposition that Trump and his team suddenly have “all the information” they need to rewrite the story of his defeat is obviously foolish, but let’s pause on the president’s use of the word “we.”
In October, Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who has touted election conspiracy theories, joined the administration as a “special government employee” with one specific focus: Olsen was hired to investigate the 2020 election. A month later, The Washington Post reported that the president “is dialing up pressure on the Justice Department to freshly scrutinize ballots from the 2020 election,” adding, “in recent private meetings, public comments and social media posts, Trump has renewed demands that members of his administration find fraud in the five-year-old defeat that he never accepted.”
Between the number of officials working on this and the realization that those who tell the truth about Trump’s 2020 defeat will be fired, it stands to reason that the White House actually will produce some kind of package “over the next couple months.” But that won’t make the manufactured evidence credible. Last fall, with time running out in the 2024 presidential election and early voting underway across much of the country, then-Sen. JD Vance refused to answer questions about who was the rightful winner of the 2020 race. The Ohio Republican complained at the time that political journalists were “obsessed” with the election from four years earlier. A year later — and roughly five years since Trump lost his reelection bid — someone is obsessed with the 2020 race, but it’s not political journalists. 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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