By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
On Sunday, September 17 – Constitution Day here in the USA – the most recent former President was on television being interviewed by Kristen Welker for NBC’s Meet the Press. During the interview, the former president was asked why he continued to fight; why he continued to insist that he had actually won the 2020 election.
In response to her questions, President Trump replied, “It was my decision, but I listened to some people.”
This sentence was within the context of a few minutes of back-and-forth in which President Trump described how he received tons of advice from tons of legal and political experts, some who recommended giving up since so many courts had rejected lawsuits, others who agreed that he should keep fighting.
The interviewer desperately wanted to get President Trump to say that it was “his decision” to keep fighting, and so he did.
And what did the partisan media do with this sound bite? They used it as the center of their spin. They spent the September 17 news cycle implying that President Trump was on his own in this battle, off on the fringe, that he decided on his own to keep insisting the election had been stolen despite all evidence to the contrary.
None of their spin is true.
As just one of many similar examples, Kate Sullivan at CNN wrote, “Former President Donald Trump said that he received counsel from numerous people shortly after the 2020 election but that it was his decision to push the false claim he won the presidency and try to overturn the results.”
Now, what’s true here? That as the executive, President Trump confirmed that he has continued to refuse to accept the Left’s claim that the Biden-Harris ticket won legitimately in 2020.
He’s acknowledging reality, of course, in that he knows what numbers were reported and certified; he knows that he’s out and Biden is in. But he’s continuing to argue that the American public deserves to see the whole story and to reveal the amount of both obvious and likely fraud that took place (and that continues to take place).
But what the press is doing instead is using this snippet from the interview to try to paint him as a lone wolf who refuses to listen to wise advisers, who knowingly insists on clinging to a desperate lie. By including a quote out of context, they can make this charge stick in the public mind.
President Trump’s advisors virtually all agreed that there was considerable fraud; their opinions varied more on the odds of getting the evidence heard, and whether it might be politically more desirable to just give up the fight despite being on the right side of the argument. But the press tries to avoid sharing that part with their audience.
Look at the context of the press example (again, we’re looking at a single CNN quote, but most of the mainstream media takes the exact same approach; we could have selected almost anyone’s coverage here).
The press always says that President Trump’s belief that that the Biden victory was “illegitimate” constitutes a “false claim.”
The press says that President Trump is “trying to overturn the results.”
Now, let’s look at this objectively, using the approach that a real scientist would take in the lab if reviewing observations set before him. What would be a fairer presentation?
President Trump is continuing to make the case that he won the presidency and that the certified Democrat victory was illegitimate. It’s not a “false claim” at all; it’s a legitimate position, because in most states, the evidence has been squelched at every turn before it’s ever had a chance to be presented in court. When a scientist sees evidence that hasn’t yet been reviewed, he calls it an untested postulate; he doesn’t call it a lie. Why does the press?
Ever since the middle of the night after the polls closed, when the chicanery started to be noticed, President Trump has been trying to prove the case that either the election was definitely stolen, or that the election was likely stolen, or possibly, that we just can’t tell for sure one way or the other, because so much intentional sloppiness was built into the process that there is no auditable data to confirm anything.
But note this wording from CNN: President Trump is trying “to overturn the results.”
He’s doing no such thing. President Trump has been trying, nonstop, to honor the results. Since he is certain that the American people re-elected him in 2020, his goal from the start has been to correct a horrible wrong. He believes – and with considerable supporting evidence on his side – that the election was stolen from the American people.
Now, you may not agree with him. You may not have studied the evidence as President Trump and many of his supporters have. You may not even know that most of this evidence has not been disproven in court, in fact, it has never seen the light of day in any court, because judges used technicalities (such as claiming a lack of standing or declaring it moot) to keep the evidence from being heard. So this might in fact shock a lot of readers.
But the fact is, whether President Trump is right or wrong about what was in fact the real will of the people in November 2020, there are several massive problems here that are not over, problems that will remain hanging over the head of the American election process forever if left unaddressed.
1. When someone with a minority position sticks to his guns and keeps making his case, that’s not necessarily spouting a lie. The media unanimity in calling President Trump’s position a lie is most reminiscent of the Renaissance-era attacks on Galileo Galilei, when church and political leaders insisted that he was lying about the earth moving around the sun. Telling the world that Galileo was lying didn’t change the absolute fact that the solar system is in fact heliocentric, not geocentric as they kept insisting for years and years. Such deception from the media is hardly supportive of the media’s special relationship in US law as a constitutionally protected provider of a service critical to a functioning republic.
2. The press should be nonpartisan – or at least, it should be nonpartisan in the aggregate. If some outlets are liberal then some others should be conservative for balance. The goal of the press should be to find the truth, whether it’s about an election, or an impeachment, or a bill under consideration in Congress, or an executive order being promulgated by the executive branch. The mass media has often questioned the results of other elections in which Republicans won – Bush-Gore 2000, Trump-Clinton 2016, Kemp-Abrams 2018, etc. – but now the press has unanimously decreed that so much as questioning the 2020 election is unacceptable and unforgivable, despite tons of evidence supporting a challenge. Is such a newsmedia thereby sabotaging its very right to the special protections the Constitution gives it?
3. By gaslighting the public this way, the press is intentionally driving the public apart, giving the political left more unjustifiable reasons to believe that President Trump and his supporters are fanciful extremists, and giving the political right more reason to distrust the process, to think that if we can’t even get a fair review of the countless irregularities of 2020, then we may as well give up on voting at all, because the press is showing us that yes, it really is in fact “rigged.”
The evidence is out in the world. It can’t be clamped down forever.
Dinesh D’Souza and True The Vote produced a film – “2000 Mules” – showing that there’s good reason to believe that millions of so-called mail-in ballots are and were fraudulent, every cycle. Legal depositions and mainstream press stories have recounted the double counting of ballots in some states, the non-counting of ballots in others, the late-night deliveries of boxes of freshly copied ballots across state lines in others. There was a ballot counting halt in one state claiming a water main burst when no such catastrophe turned out to have happened at all. Nursing home workers in some states have been arrested for blanket theft of the ballots of their patients. The social media posts recruiting people from all over the country to cast ballots from their friends’ addresses in Georgia have been shared and saved.
Even if none of this ever makes it into the courts, even if none of it gets an election thrown out (and 2.5 years in, nobody expects the results from 2020 to be changed retroactively), we do have a right to expect that our mass media will report it at least, in the interest of being on the side of truth, not on the side of one specific party or the other.
We have learned – more and more over the past hundred years, but especially over the past ten – how important it is to read the context surrounding every quote.
It used to be that everybody knew lots of politicians who lie.
But we never realized until recently how even the worst politicians are amateurs on that scale, when compared with the mainstream media.
Copyright 2023 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook, Twitter, Gettr or TruthSocial.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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