Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...If you’re pushing the baseless conspiracy theory that the results of last week’s California primary elections were rigged against Republicans like gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, it would seem highly inconvenient that Hilton has succeeded in qualifying for the November runoffs.
But if you’re a seasoned conspiracy theorist, as President Donald Trump is, you don’t just stop telling a fantastical tale when it is contradicted by new facts. Rather, you simply adjust the conspiracy theory so that the new facts now fit within it.
**RELATED: No, Spencer Pratt did not receive only 0 votes in one of the LA mayoral race tallies **
Trump has years of experience with this kind of dishonest narrative flexibility. It’s what he employed, for example, after former President Barack Obama released his long-form Hawaii birth certificate in 2011, conclusively disproving Trump’s conspiracy theory that Obama wasn’t actually born in the US. Rather than immediately abandon his nonsense, Trump soon began suggesting the birth certificate was a phony.
This time, rather than conceding that it’s obviously time to abandon his “rigged election” declarations about California, Trump has begun claiming that he had jawboned the riggers into submission … but only in Hilton’s case, not the case of unsuccessful Republican Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt.
Try to follow along here. Hilton hasn’t endorsed Trump’s fraud claims; he has said he has “seen nothing” to justify any legal intervention. But Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that Hilton’s qualification for the runoff, as projected by CNN and others, happened because Trump had publicly warned that Democrats were about to rig the results to prevent Hilton from qualifying for the runoff. It was because of this Trump “heat,” Trump said, that unnamed Democrats felt compelled to surrender their plan to cheat Hilton like they, according to Trump, cheated Pratt.
Trump’s story: “And then I hit them hard on that (Pratt’s defeat), but I started talking about Steve Hilton, who’s a fantastic guy. And I saw them say it was going to be two weeks before they knew, and I started hitting them. ‘It’s going to happen to Steve Hilton, too.’ It’s – ‘Watch, you gotta watch’ – and they approved Steve Hilton very quickly. They didn’t want, there was too much heat on them. The only reason he got approved – he had all the votes he needed, probably to be first place – but the only reason they approved Steve Hilton, it was going to be two weeks, they said, and then they approved him that night. Because the heat was on them, because they’re cheatin’ dogs.”
He repeated the story Thursday morning on Fox News, saying that a rigged defeat “was happening to Steve Hilton” but then “I went on such a tear that they approved it immediately; they approved Steve. It’s such a rigged deal, it’s so crazy. They were, they approved him so fast because everybody was watching.”
This is, of course, complete hogwash.
All that has happened in California, as far as all available evidence shows, is that counties are counting votes – slowly, as usual, but legitimately. In the case of the Los Angeles mayoral primary, counting votes has meant that it has become clear that Pratt will not achieve the top-two finish needed to qualify for the runoff. In the case of the state primary for governor, counting votes has meant that it has become clear that Hilton will achieve a top-two finish.
No California authority “approved him,” whether because of Trump or because of anybody else; there was no behind-the-scenes decision to grant Hilton his wish. The reality is boring: California voters voted; counties counted; media outlets eventually projected, unofficially, that Hilton would earn enough votes to advance in a state in which about 45% of registered voters were Democratic and about 25% were Republican; separately, media outlets unofficially projected that Pratt wouldn’t earn enough votes to advance in a city in which Democrats outnumbered Republicans much more significantly, about 55% to 15%.
The end. Except, as usual with Trump, not the end.
A mountainous supply of evidence, over the course of more than five years, has never been sufficient to get Trump to drop his conspiratorial lying about the 2020 presidential election he lost. It’s no surprise that one very strong piece of contradicting evidence hasn’t been sufficient to get him to dump this new round of foolishness.
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