Donald Trump is running for the presidency again; but does he even know what year it is?
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— NAVIGATING THE INSANITY* —
Donald Trump bizarrely claimed Tuesday that the “White House” helped rig the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor even though he himself was commander in chief at the time.
The former president, who did not leave office (i.e., the “White House”) until January 20, 2021, reacted to a letter Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent to House Republicans this week. In it, the tech entrepreneur expressed regret over censoring coronavirus misinformation after being pressured to do so by the administration of President Joe Biden.
Zuckerberg, who is apparently able to read a calendar and is at least loosely aware of who the American president is at any given time, made clear that this happened in 2021, when Biden was indeed in office.
Trump seems to be confused about both.
“Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!),” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED.”
Trump did not explain how or why he rigged the election against himself.
If you are not familiar with MAGAspeak, “Hunter Biden’s laptop” is a thing that Republicans believe might have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.
Three weeks before that election, the FBI issued a warning that a story published in the Trump-aligned New York Post about that laptop might be Russian misinformation, which caused social media companies to block references to it.
In case you don’t have a calendar at hand, “Three weeks before the election” means mid-October of 2020, a year during which Trump was president every single day.
The story alleged that information from the laptop provided evidence that Biden was corrupt.
Since its publication, nobody has been able to prove that this was actually part of a Russian plot to help Trump get re-elected (meaning that he would have stayed in office beyond his term, which began on January 20, 2017, and then continuously lasted until January 20, 2021).
Conversely, and not for a lack of trying, House Republicans have not presented any proof supporting their claim that Biden is corrupt. It would seem that GOP “investigators,” after spending millions of dollars on these probes, might have come up with something by now if such evidence existed.
Therefore, in essence, they have shown that the meritless story was not Russian propaganda, but good old-fashioned American propaganda published in a pro-Trump news outlet.
None of this is to say that social media platforms should censor information. This is a difficult question. It stands to reason that some of the things published about the global pandemic were entirely true and should definitely not have been censored.
Conversely, at the height of the pandemic, when thousands of Americans were dying every month, there was a lot of misinformation that could have caused even more deaths.
Therefore, it is a legitimate topic for debate whether the government should try to limit what Americans can see on social media.
What is not in dispute, however, is who was president in 2020… that was Donald J. Trump.
*In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often funny analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
