Are Trump's Claims of 2020 Election Fraud Really False?

 As I write this, NPR (National Public Radio) plays in the background and CNN's website is open on my laptop in a different tab.  Both of them are still airing reports that Trump falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen.  

If by "stolen" they mean dead people voting more than they always do in America or China hacking into computerized voting systems, then no, the election was not stolen.  But there are more subtle ways to shift a close election, especially by shaping media coverage. 

In fact, the major media tilted the election in Biden's favor by depriving Trump of the chance to make his best case for reelection to the American people. They did so in these ways:

• Burying Trump's antiwar stance, one that appeals to broad sections of both the liberal and conservative wings of the American public. 
• Airing false claims that Trump called neo-Nazis "very fine people." 
• Mishandling the Hunter Biden laptop story

I. Trump's Antiwar Stance

    A. Let's start with CNN and the way they edited Trump's 2016 victory speech. 

They aired his speech live, including the part where he tells the world that while he would always put America's interest first, his administration would partnership, not conflict. Trump's words served as an implicit rebuke to America's hawkish, murderous foreign policy. 

Here is Trump's entire victory speech, with his peace message beginning at the 6 minute mark in the video:

I was unable to find CNN's edited version of the victory speech on YouTube, but the CNN link is here.

Clearly, an antiwar message is one that enjoys broad support among both liberals and conservatives. CNN undermined Trump's chance to get liberal support. 

In condensing the speech, CNN edited out Trump's praise of his family and campaign staff--BUT, they also edited out Trump's antiwar statement. One must ask why?  Is a president-elect's foreign policy orientation unimportant. Is war and peace an unimportant issue of no interest to the almost 2 million Americans on active military duty and the reserves? Do the families of our military personnel regard these issues as trivial?

Clearly, these issues are of enormous importance to millions of Americans. 

    B. Fast forward to Donald Trump's reelection campaign in 2020. Traditionally, the last in a serious of election debates focused on foreign policy, but not that year.  A BBC article records the charges and counter-charges by Biden and Trump. In any event, foreign policy was removed from the list of topics. It is easy to suspect why this might have happened. 

Donald Trump was the first president in decades not to involve the US in a new war.  Consequently, the deaths of American military personnel in combat were at a low as well.  The Defense Casualty Analysis System lists military death by year.    Adding the four years that Trump was in office gives a total of 65 "hostile action" deaths. 

Compare this to Obama who, in his second term, lost 91 troops in a single year. Obama, for whom I voted in 2008, deserves a pass during his first term because he inherited a royal mess from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.  However, casualties during his second term belong to him. There were 160 hostile action deaths in his second term. Rolling Stone reports that 2500 American troops died under the Obama administration's eight years. 

In 2020, Biden, who not only voted for the Iraq War but championed it, was vulnerable on this question because of the thousands of US combat deaths.  As an aside, Biden called for "boots in the ground" in Iraq as early as 1998--three years before the 9/11 attacks. 

[Update: A debate on foreign policy also had the potential to raise the issue of Ukraine and Hunter Biden's financial ties to a large Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.]

C.  Points A and B do not imply that Trump was perfect in this regard. 

Trump fought the wars he inherited with viciousness. He ramped up bombings in the Horn of Africa and John Bolton, who worked for Trump at the time, has claimed credit for a coup attempt in Venezuela. Bolton was a known hawk. If Trump hired him, the responsibility rests with him. Still, Trump was the least hawkish of recent US presidents. 

D. In the 2024 Debate, the Media Remained Silent about Trump's Claims on Ukraine Casualties. 

A transcript from the debate quotes Trump as saying the following:

I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly -- people being killed by the millions. It's the millions. It's so much worse than the numbers that you're getting, which are fake numbers. . . . If I win, when I'm President-Elect, and what I'll do is I'll speak to one, I'll speak to the other, I'll get them together. That war would have never happened. And in fact when I saw Putin after I left, unfortunately left because our country has gone to hell, but after I left when I saw him building up soldiers, he did it after I left, I said oh, he must be negotiating. It must be a good strong point of negotiation. Well, it wasn't because Biden had no idea how to talk to him. He had no idea how to stop it. And now you have millions of people dead and it's only getting worse and it could lead to World War 3. Don't kid yourself, David. We're playing with World War 3. 

David Muir declined to accept Trump's response and asked, again, if he thought it was in the best interests of the US for Ukraine to lose the war.  He seemed unable or unwilling to understand that a negotiated settlement might be in the US's best interest, a point Trump tried to explain: 

I think it's in the U.S. best interest to get this war finished and just get it done. All right. Negotiate a deal. Because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed.

Trump's answer was a compassionate and humane one. It marked him as the least pro-war major candidate. No wonder the moderators declined to comment. 

Viewers of both the debate and the post-debate commentary will recall that neither Muir nor subsequent commentators mentioned Trump's claims about Ukraine at all. No one bothered to fact-check him about the claims of millions of lives lost.  Why the silence? 

I suspect that the reason for the silence is that Trump is correct, if not about the number of casualties--I have no way of knowing if that claim is correct or not--then about the enormous risk the US is taking in arming a Russian enemy. 

The 2024 election marks the third one in which the major media have tried to silence Trump's antiwar views. 

 II. The "Nazis Are Very Fine People" Myth

This story goes back to a march in Charlottesville in 2017. The demonstration started as a protest against removing monuments honoring Confederate soldiers. Opponents of removing them included neo-Nazis and KKK members.   Other opponents were not members of hate groups but people who had an attachment to these monuments.  I have lived in Mississippi for ten years now and one of the surprising things about the place is the importance placed on family history.  Meeting someone for the first time is liable to involve a conversation about great-great grandparents and where they came from, where they lived, and what work they did. Thus, it is not surprising that even people who do not belong to hate groups would want memorials honoring their family members to remain standing. 

Trump's "very fine people" comment referred to these non-hate-filled traditionalists. For the record, I believe they are wrong and that Confederate statues should be removed from public spaces and placed in museums. However, the fact that they disagree with me does not make them ogres.

Here is Trump's early comment: 

Trump did wait too long to clarify his comment--forty-eight hours--but his condemnation was unsparing and articulate: 

Notably, David Muir did not fact-check Kamala Harris when she repeated this "very fine people" claim and ignored Trump's forceful condemnation of white supremacists.

III. The Hunter Biden Laptop Story

The FBI knew and the media should have known that yes, that laptop really belonged to Hunter Biden and that those really were Hunter Biden's emails.  By the time the story broke in the New York Post, there was no doubt about those facts.  Because Hunter Biden was struggling with addiction at the time the emails were written, it is wise to remain skeptical about his claims that his father was getting kickbacks from him. After all, Hunter Biden was blowing through huge amounts of money and needed an excuse for his never having any--in spite of earning astronomical sums from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company.  This money started flowing in Hunter's direction after his father, when he was vice president, was placed in charge of coordinating US policy toward Ukraine. 

The FBI had been warning social media companies about the possibility of Russian disinformation involving the 2020 election but after priming these companies to suspect that the Hunter Biden laptop story might be false, did not bother to inform them that yes, the laptop was really Hunter Biden's. 

FBI agents intervened in the election by trying to suppress coverage critical of Biden, even though they knew this coverage was true. When a powerful government agency acts to suppress press reports about a candidate's possible corruption, that agency has tilted the election toward one candidate rather than another. 

In this respect, at least, the election was, if not exactly stolen, then manipulated. 

Even if you dislike Trump or are ambivalent about Trump, as I am, FBI action to distort reporting on a presidential election should have all Americans up in arms--metaphorically, not literally. 

What was the media response to these revelations?

1. Framing the laptop story as Russian disinformation--even though responsible people knew better. Fifty intelligence professionals signed this letter.  The letter is a masterpiece of obfuscation. It begins with citing the signatories' credentials. Paragraph 2 frames Russia as the most serious enemy we face. 

Look at paragraphs 3 and 4: 

Perhaps most important, each of us believes deeply that American citizens should determine the outcome of elections, not foreign governments. All of us agree with the founding fathers’ concern about the damage that foreign interference in our poli8cs can do to our democracy.

It is for all these reasons that we write to say that the arrival on the US poli<cal scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.

Only in Paragraph 5 do these intelligence professionals issue a disclaimer that they don't know for certain that the laptop story is disinformation--and they did so after ringing appeals to American democracy--and after stoking fears of our Russian enemy.  This paragraph reeks of butt-covering:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case. 

Approximately 40 words deny certain knowledge but even in this paragraph,  they refer again to their experience as a way of assuring the reader that they are probably right.  

It is a truism of journalism that many people read only the first two or three paragraphs of a story. Buy burying this bit of information in Paragraph 5, the authors have covered themselves while still making sure this timid disclaimer gets little attention. 

The next paragraph appears in italics in the original:

If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this. 

By burying the disclaimer in the fifth paragraph and following it by an italicized statement, which is more visually salient and more likely to be noticed, the signers have left themselves with plausible deniability in case it is later discovered that the laptop and emails really were Hunters while at the same time drawing attention away from the disclaimer. 

And how did our media betters respond to this letter? With investigative journalism? No, by either framing the laptop story as Russian disinformation or by burying the story altogether.

• Twitter blocked users from sharing the story.  This policy was short-lived--approximately 48 hours or less, but it occurred three weeks before the election and even this short-term ban left little time for the story to be spread after the policy was reversed. 
• Here is what Twitter users saw when they tried to post or access the laptop story according to NPR:

Twitter went further. It is blocking users from posting pictures of the emails or links to two of the New York Post's stories referring to them, spokesman Trenton Kennedy said, citing its rules against sharing "content obtained through hacking that contains private information."

Twitter shows a warning screen to users who clicked on links to a New York Post story.

Screenshot by NPR

Users who try to share the links on Twitter are shown a notice saying, "We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful."

If a user clicks on links already posted on Twitter, the user is taken to a warning screen saying, "this link may be unsafe," which they have to click past to read the story. Twitter also required the New York Post to delete its tweet about the story.

• The newspaper that blocked the story, the New York Post was locked out of its own Twitter account.
• Facebook did not ban sharing the article but it tweaked its algorithm to limit how many feeds the laptop story appeared in. Zuckerberg stated publicly that while the FBI did not mention laptops or Hunter Biden specifically, the agency did warn about Russian disinformation dumps and Facebook employees believed the laptop story fit the pattern. 
• According to a former deputy director of the CIA MikeMorell, Antony Blinken, then a Biden campaign advisor and now Secretary of State, orchestrated the capaign to get intelligence professionals to sign the Russian disinformation statement.  If this account is true, it means that all of these intelligence professionals must have known they were using their credentials to side with one political candidate over another. Since they were former intelligence professionals, they were technically within the law, but the procedure was slimy anyway.

Was the 2020 election stolen?  It depends on how broadly or narrowly you want to define theft. But, gee, what does it look like?