This is so gawd damned dangerous it makes us want to scream. This is exactly how republics end, this, right here. What had been a fringe movement spurned on by Donald Trump’s toddler-like inability to handle setbacks and disappointment, is now assumed knowledge on the mainstream Right, not even necessarily MAGA right. From henceforth in mainstream Republican media, Donald Trump won in 2020 and it was all stolen by a cabal of Democrats.
They just green-lighted violence without mentioning it.
The Fox & Friends morning Zoo Crew were all atwitter about how wonderful Trump looked and sounded (“he looks like he’s lost weight, had a bounce in his step”) which is the opposite of what we saw. We saw a sweating, slurring, incoherent man, obsessed with “winning again.” Thus it is, according to mainstream Republicanism, that Donald Trump won the election, period. From Mediaite [1]:
Pete Hegseth joined the show from Orlando, where he covered CPAC for Fox News and was a featured speaker [2]. He noted how seeing Trump emerge was like seeing an old friend, an idea with which Fox & Friends seemed to agree wholly.
“Pete, that’s what they wanted to hear. They wanted to hear there’s the going to be a Republican in the big chair at the White House in four years,” Steve Doocy noted, to which Hegseth added that Trump “went on to say we may just have to beat them for the third time.”
Doocy followed with, “Because he won last time before they took it away from him.” Hegseth added, “There you go, exactly. Everyone in the crowd got it right away.”
Now, Mediaite does qualify Doocy’s statement and it is an important qualifier:
To be fair, it’s not at all clear that Doocy’s comment is in support of Trump’s baseless claims, but more like he is taking great delight in explaining a joke to an adoring audience who may not be clever enough to get it.
Maybe, but Hegseth wasn’t joking, not at all.
Only later on did Doocy clear up the confusion, quite possibly too late for much of the audience:
Later in the show, Doocy returned to this but made clear that it was Trump’s claim. “And then [Trump] said, you know, maybe I’ll just have to run and win a third time, he said, because he feels that it was taken away from him, he talked about the whole thing was rigged.” Then later, while interviewing Rep. Jim Jordan, Doocy dismissed the claim of a stolen election as a “joke.”
“Trump did say, you know, look. I might have to go and I might have to win again because apparently, he thinks that he won,” he paraphrased Trump. “Everybody I think, got his joke, but going forward because he said it was all rigged, but then again, the electoral college and also Mike Pence have made it clear in the last couple of months, he did not win according to the rules.”
WRONG: If everyone “got his joke” there wouldn’t have been an insurrection at the Capitol and Trump wouldn’t have spent one-third of his speech talking about winning last time.
No, we have already seen a violent rush on the Capitol over the “Giant Lie” and people barely got out of that one unscathed, indeed law-enforcement did not. If the MAGAs really believe that Trump won and the election was stolen, and that “steal” is blessed on FOX News – whether they get the joke or not – the MAGAs might bring guns to the Capitol next time. If one believes that the other side clearly stole an election, there are two choices, deal with it – as Al Gore did, or fight to the point where the strongest fighter wins.
This is how republics die. Hegseth definitely believes the election was stolen and Doocy may also believe it but knows he has to be a little more careful. He has that prime morning salary riding on being more accurate. Trump’s speech yesterday just made the nation a more dangerous place to live and it wasn’t safe on Saturday.
Fox & Friends laughs about how Trump actually won the 2020 election, "they just took it away from him," because the demented conspiracy theory that led to five deaths is just one big lol now pic.twitter.com/Y4MX7IeDJY [3]
— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 1, 2021 [4]
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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak