Maggie Haberman: Trump Pressuring Conservative Writers to ‘Legitimize’ Stolen Election Narrative
During a Wednesday morning appearance on CNN’s New Day, Maggie Haberman reported that former President Donald Trump is putting pressure on conservative writers to legitimize his baseless “stolen election” narrative.
Haberman’s appearance comes a day after she reported that Trump was telling people that he expects to be reinstated as President in August, which, as John Berman described as “madness.”
Haberman wrote in a Tuesday Tweet that “Trump has been telling several people he’s in contact with that he expects he will be reinstated by August” with an important parenthetical caveat that states “(no, that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information).”
The New York Times reporter clarified her report to say that Trump is echoing comments made by Trump’s former attorney Sidney Powell and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, each of whom has been amplifying baseless conspiracy theories of a stolen election. However, the difference between Trump making these baseless and unhinged claims is that Trump “is a former president and the other is a future nominee.”
“If he ran for president again, he would still have a very good shot at the nomination,” Haberman noted. “And this is something that some of his supports will hear and take seriously when he says it.”
To be clear, Haberman also noted that “there is no legal mechanism by which this can happen.”
She then added some new reporting that Trump is pressuring conservative writers to legitimize his stolen election narrative, or, as she said, he is “trying to flush into the conservative media ecosystem” to give weight to the baseless stolen election lie.
Drawing a parallel to when Trump tried to encourage public pressure to fire his then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Haberman said that Trump is trying to get conservative writers to go public—in a more mainstream way—to promote the idea that this election was stolen from him, “to try to legitimize it, to try to get people to call attention to it.”
Haberman also made a salient point about the jarring nature of our current news environment, and the separation of media diets, which she believes has “gotten worse progressively over time.” She explained that “Democrats who support Joe Biden don’t want to hear anything about Donald Trump, and because Donald Trump is not on Twitter anymore, they think, therefore, he doesn’t really exist, except he does really exist strongly in this right-wing ecosystem.”
Watch above.
