While the majority of Trump supporters think that the Trump loss was due to a rigged election, their notion of rigging leaves a lot to be desired. It was not tampered with in the way they think. This was a systemic rigging brought on by a four-year effort to find any way possible to get rid of Trump and revert to business as usual.
If anything was rigged it was the information flow – a concerted effort by a complicit media machine that consisted of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major TV news networks, PBS, NPR, and social media. This was aided and abetted by American and foreign intelligence agencies, the universities, big business, and the Democrat Party.
This began with calls for Trump’s impeachment before he set foot in office. After his inauguration, coordinated women’s protests cropped up across the country and the notion of #resist began, with Hillary Clinton leading the way.
Trump’s victory over Hillary in 2016 made the media reassess its coverage of Trump as analysts determined that Trump was given over a billion dollars in free publicity.
The coverage started to change. Trump was no longer portrayed as entertaining and oafish but as a bad person on many levels. Most editorials about Trump showed outright hatred. Objectivity was out of the question.
A good list of all the negative associations attached to Trump is linked here.
The institutional attacks began then and ran parallel to media hate. This involved a dubious investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, somehow orchestrated by Trump.
This investigation, led by Robert Mueller, dragged on for 675 days and included 500 witnesses, and found nothing actionable except against a few of the witnesses for lying. All the while members of the Democratic Party such as Adam Schiff would come on PBS News Hour time after time claiming they had secret damning evidence that would prove Trump is a Russian agent, a Russian asset, or a Russian spy.
The public was inundated with the Russian meme for almost two years as this investigation continued. And even after its conclusion, the Russian accusations continued to the end. Once that was over, another scandal was created around a phone call made to the Ukraine where Trump hints that the activities of Hunter Biden in Ukraine should be examined. That resulted in Trump getting impeached the first time.
Less noticeable to the public was the disappearance of coverage of the Trump rallies. You could argue that this was the key change in dealing with Trump.
During the 2016 election, Bernie Sanders had rallies much like Trump’s but they received no coverage from the media despite their popularity. This worked to keep Hillary as the candidate. During 2016, coverage of the Trump rallies was extensive and even MSNBC, the most biased cable channel, would show Trump rallies from beginning to end.
These rallies put Trump in a different and likeable light, which swayed a lot of voters. In the 2020 election, the rallies were now broadcast by obscure YouTube channels and maybe CSPAN. The major news outlets described them in negative terms. During the Covid months they were all described as horrible super-spreader events that risked people’s lives, implying that Trump was irresponsible.
To pile on, you had social media taking sides against Trump to the point that Twitter started to censure the president’s tweets and then took him off the platform. Facebook and Twitter both did a number of purges of conservative voices from their platforms for a variety of reasons, “hate speech” being the foremost.
Then there was the discovery by psychologist Robert Epstein that Google search results were being manipulated to push people in a liberal direction after the 2016 election. Leaked videos of Google founder Sergey Brin, almost in tears after the Hillary Clinton loss, revealed the bias of the company with promises of being more activist. Studies of company behavior showed that it promoted Get Out the Vote messages to those whom Google perceived as Democrats. The search results were also rigged.
During the 2020 election itself, the majority of the American public were kept in the dark regarding Biden’s mental health, the connection between the Bidens and China, and the entire Hinter Biden laptop story. The media buried the laptop story as if it never happened.
And you should note that the same media which made a huge fuss over John McCain’s age when he ran for President in 2008 (he was 72 at the time) said little about Joe Biden being 78 and frail.
Then there were the anti-Trump books. One after the other described White House bedlam. You were gold to the major New York publishing houses if you could get a job in the White House just to get fired so you could write a book. In fact, there was no genuine dirt revealed in any of the books, just inuendo, acrimony, and accusations with the overall theme that Trump was “unfit” for office, whatever that was supposed to mean.
After four years of a free-for-all assault on Trump and the Office of the President, conservatives are told to believe that the election was rigged by mail-in ballot fraud.
It’s laughable when you consider the relentless and unwavering hounding of this president and subsequent pounding of the public psyche for four years. Are you supposed to believe that this effort by big media, the intelligence agencies, Chinese vested interests, bankers, big business, the Democrat party, and certain brand name Republicans including, above all, Mitt Romney, had no influence on how people voted?
To think Trump won by a landslide is to deny a concerted, coordinated, targeted, and relentless propaganda effort of four years. – jcd