Inside the Right-Wing Media Bubble, Where the Myth of a Trump Win Lives On
President Trumpâs media criticism is usually binary â there are âgood stories,â favorable to him, and then the other category.
Most news coverage on Monday fell into that other category. One by one, presidential electors in all 50 states and the District of Columbia formally recognized Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect, the latest and most significant rejection so far of Mr. Trumpâs desperate attempts to undo the will of the voters.
But inside the sprawling and self-reinforcing network of websites, podcasts and video news that has fed some of the most reckless and unrealistic claims about the election, the myth of Mr. Trumpâs political survival endures.
The lead story on the Gateway Pundit, which researchers have identified as one of the major sources of pro-Trump misinformation online, floated the idea of a âBOMBSHELLâ ruling in a case on Monday that the site teased as a possible game-changer: âWill a Small County in Northern Michigan Be the Key to Overturning the Nationâs Election Results?â
On a podcast hosted by Mr. Trumpâs former White House chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, a conservative activist vowed to file a new lawsuit seeking to reverse the electorsâ vote â adding to the dozens of suits so far, nearly all of which have been dismissed. âIntimidation and fear is not something that works in a democracy,â said Phill Kline, the director of the conservative Amistad Project, vowing to continue the fight.
The podcast was one of at least six on the list of Appleâs 100 most popular podcasts that are hosted by someone who has been vocally supportive of Mr. Trumpâs attack on the nationâs electoral system.
The world seems to have recognized what the Electoral College affirmed on Monday: Mr. Trump will be leaving office whether he wants to accept his fate or not. The Supreme Court refused to second-guess this reality on Friday when it rejected a legally dubious, last-minute maneuver by the State of Texas. Numerous world leaders have accepted it by congratulating Mr. Biden. Even Mr. Trumpâs own administration eventually bowed and agreed to formally begin the transition process.
Yet six weeks after his defeat, the aggressive campaign by Mr. Trump and his media boosters to insist with each new setback that the election is far from settled isnât letting up.
Inside this bubble, the presidentâs allies present virtually impossible outcomes as completely plausible. They raise expectations of victory in unwinnable lawsuits and battles over electors that state legislators are unwilling to have. They bolster the credibility of questionable witnesses and advocates whose most important qualification is an unequivocal conviction that Mr. Trump won in November, despite all available evidence.
And then when they donât meet the bar they set, they move it.
This is what the presidentâs senior adviser, Stephen Miller, demonstrated on Monday when he insisted in an interview on âFox & Friends” that the Electoral College vote was largely irrelevant because all that truly mattered was Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.
âSo we have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner,â Mr. Miller said, resetting the calendar to another scheme to invalidate the votes of millions of Americans, because the previous one had flopped.
Some allies of Mr. Trump had hoped the Electoral College vote would end with a different outcome: that Republican legislators in six battleground states would name slates of electors favorable to Mr. Trump. Late last week, a coalition of leaders affiliated with the Tea Party, conservative political organizations and social conservative groups wrote an open letter urging activists to âbegin mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of electors be appointed.â
The upheaval failed to materialize and the electors cast their votes on Monday without incident. The few instances of resistance by Republicans were muted and entirely symbolic.
All along, Trump-friendly media personalities like Mark Levin, who hosts one of the most popular talk radio shows in the country, have led their audiences to believe that it was possible to pressure state lawmakers to reject Mr. Bidenâs victory. They have often based their confidence on the wild accusations of people with political motives and diminished credibility.
Mr. Levin, along with Rush Limbaugh and Mr. Bannon, was one of the first to give a national platform to the conspiracy theories of the lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, whose various claims of fraud involve a multinational network of saboteurs and domestic enemies of the president both dead (Hugo ChĂĄvez of Venezuela) and alive (âNever Trumpâ Republican officials).
In an interview with Mr. Levin on Nov. 10, for instance, Mr. Wood called for the Biden electors to be replaced in a special session of Georgiaâs legislature âso they can elect the electors to vote for Donald Trump.â He then falsely claimed that Mr. Trump not only won the state by âa landslideâ but also won the national popular vote with 70 percent support.
On their own, comments as outlandish as these might not rise to become as widely accepted as they are now among Mr. Trumpâs base. But the hosts validated them beyond just giving them a platform. They vouched for the professional credibility of the lawyers.
Speaking to his audience the next day, Mr. Limbaugh cited Mr. Woodâs remarks and said, âIâm telling you that if you listen to Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, they continue to make it sound like itâs a slam dunk.â Mr. Limbaugh offered his assurances that the lawyers would not put their careers on the line if they werenât serious.
âTheyâve Paul Bunyan-ized them,â said Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, a left-leaning group. âAnd now theyâre invested in maintaining this story.â
Though Ms. Powellâs list of conspirators and crimes committed against the president grew too bizarre even for the Trump campaign â it disavowed her in a statement on Nov. 22 â the pro-Trump media continued to give her a friendly platform.
On Monday, with Mr. Bidenâs victory about to be ratified by the electors, the Gateway Pundit posted an item about an interview she had done with The Epoch Times, another major purveyor of pro-Trump misinformation. Ms. Powell claimed in passing that âone of our expertsâ discovered how Dominion voting machines had manufactured tallies that led to â5 percent higher votes for Biden across the board, everywhere.â
Ms. Powell has also appeared recently on other more mainstream pro-Trump new outlets like Fox Business, where Lou Dobbs interviewed her last week.
Far-fetched tales of vast, subversive networks of infiltrators have a long history in the Republican Party. Ms. Powellâs claims that Cuba, Venezuela and China are behind a plot to install rigged voting machines in the United States have echoes of the anti-communist paranoia that was promoted in the 1960s by the John Birch Society and Phyllis Schlafly, considered by many to be the matriarch of the conservative movement.
Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who helped write âNetwork Propaganda,â a study on the right-wing mediaâs influence on politics, said the difference between the days of the John Birch Society and today was a matter of scale. âWhat you didnât get then was the same market exposure,â he said. âYou didnât have tens of millions of voters exposed.â
And the fringe never, of course, enjoyed the support of the sitting president.
Now, there is little incentive for right-wing media to provide anything other than validation of Mr. Trumpâs most outrageous claims. And those who try to correct the record are punished, as Tucker Carlson of Fox News learned when he questioned Ms. Powellâs credibility and faced a backlash.
âWeâre in this feedback loop where the media give the audience weapons and tools with which to deny reality,â Mr. Benkler said. âAnd the audience disciplines the media by threatening to go somewhere even wackier if they donât toe the line.â
When Mr. Trumpâs allies filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court last week that legal experts said had a scant chance of success, there was little mention of its flaws in the media most loyal to him. Most talk instead focused on the presidentâs framing of the lawsuit as âthe big one.â Mr. Limbaugh noted there was support for the case among 18 Republican attorneys general and others in the House of Representatives. Then he asked about those still sitting on the sidelines.
âWhere are the other Republicans?â he asked. âDonât they realize, if the Democrats are allowed to get away with stealing the White House, theyâre never going to stop stealing elections?â
Dozens more House Republicans would eventually get behind the case. Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said Mr. Trump had a singular hold on his party unlike that of any other modern president. âSeventy-four million votes, 126 House Republicans â the constituency for this is unlike anything weâve ever seen,â Mr. Rosenthal said.
When the Supreme Court rejected the case, Mr. Trumpâs supporters didnât deny that the defeat stung, but they insisted that the setback was only temporary.
The news appeared to unsettle one host on Newsmax TV, an alternative to Fox News that has increased its ratings lately as the president has publicly attacked Fox News for declaring Mr. Biden as the president-elect, as well as other acts of perceived disloyalty.
âItâs not over, itâs not over,â said the host, Greg Kelly, pointing to lawsuits that were still pending in a handful of states. âItâs not over by any stretch.â
That sounded a lot like Mr. Trump on Monday as he tried to deflect attention from the Electoral College vote and shift it to the case in Michigan that the Gateway Pundit had earlier called a bombshell. âWOW. This report shows massive fraud. Election changing result,â the president wrote on Twitter, ensuring that the fight would continue, at least as far as he and his supporters were concerned.