Former President Donald Trump said Sunday that he didn’t respect lawyers and members of his campaign who told him he lost the 2020 presidential election, and that it was his decision to buy into the theory that the election was rigged.

“In many cases, I didn’t respect them,” Trump said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” when asked why he decided to ignore his lawyers and advisers who told him he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. “But I did respect others. I respected many others that said the election was rigged.”

Trump, the current frontrunner in the GOP presidential primary, is facing indictments related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In the federal case against him, prosecutors cited the fact that Trump was told repeatedly by his lawyers that he had lost the election. Trump’s campaign lost dozens of lawsuits trying to challenge his 2020 defeat in the weeks after the election, with their baseless conspiracy theories swatted away.

When pressed about how he came to the conclusion that the election was rigged, Trump said it was his own decision.

  • Simulation6
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    49
    ·
    10 months ago

    Weren’t they claiming the election was rigged before the voting started? He never had any intention of giving up power.

    • Riccosuave@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      10 months ago

      He started the grift back in 2016. He claimed that election was rigged as well, even though he won, and everyone seems to have forgotten that.

    • Elderos@lemmings.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      10 months ago

      He called the Emmy awards rigged the entire time his show was on-air. There is no universe in which trump is losing where he’s not blaming someone else.

      • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        10 months ago

        Except that one is more likely than not to be true. At least in the sense that they are biased. People didn’t come up with the term Emmy/Oscar bait for nothing.

        • candybrie@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          10 months ago

          Emmy/Oscar bait isn’t evidence of rigging. It’s evidence that the criteria for choosing awards recipients is pretty consistent, if not in line with what makes a movie popular. I guess that’s a kind of bias, but that’s every subjective award ever.

    • 2piradians@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      They began trying to stoke doubt on mail-in voting years ago, along with trying to gut the postal service. We could see all this coming long before the election.

      EDIT: Grammar

    • CompostMaterial@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      10 months ago

      It’s too bad he didn’t. Then we could have pried it out of his cold dead hands and saved the tax payers a lot of money.