Steve Doocy Delights in Explaining Trump’s Stolen Election CPAC Speech: ‘He Won Last Time Before They Took It Away from Him’
Former President Donald Trump has returned to the public stage and repeated the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen.” It appears that Fox News opinion programming is happy to go along with that lie, and not responsibly factcheck the baseless claim that fueled the deadly insurrection on the Capitol that occurred on Jan. 6.
Fox & Friends opened Monday’s show delighted to see their old friend, former President Trump, who reemerged on the national stage Sunday afternoon with a rousing speech that closed CPAC. Trump trotted out many of his “greatest hits,” including repeated and baseless claims that he only lost the election due to widespread voter fraud, even though his campaign lawyers lost nearly every legal challenge.
Election results — or the false claim about fraud — comprised a major section of Trump’s speech. Fox & Friends mostly ignored it and focused instead on how bad the Biden Administration has been in a month and a half. They also found time to praise Trump’s appearance (“He looks like he lost weight!”) and the “bounce in his step.”
Pete Hegseth joined the show from Orlando, where he covered CPAC for Fox News and was a featured speaker. 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.”
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.
Given the very real harm that the stolen election claim has done to a divided nation and to the underpinnings of US democratic institutions, the responsible thing to do would be to clarify to viewers that the election was not stolen.
But that would, of course, spoil the joke.
Update: 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.”
Watch above via Fox News.
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