Donald Trump complained again on Monday that the 2020 election should be overturned in a Truth Social post which clearly depicted a candidate unused to the prospect of his own defeat.
Nearly two years after he was defeated by Joe Biden and stopped from running the White House for another four years, Mr Trump is still adamant that he should be ushered into the presidency.
“Now that the FBI and DOJ have been caught in a massive and determinative Election Rigging Scam, are they going to change the results of the 2020 Presidential Election? They should!!!” he wrote Monday afternoon.
His latest demand centres around the idea that the FBI and Department of Justice cost him the 2020 election by preventing news outlets and his own supporters on social media from spreading articles and posts about Hunter Biden and allegations of illegal activities by him and Mr Biden which were supposedly hinted at in messages on a laptop obtained by conservative activists through improbable circumstances that year.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast that Facebook and Twitter were both contacted by those agencies during the 2020 season and warned about Russian-led efforts to spread misinformation and polarising content in a manner similar to interference in the 2016 election.
But crucially, Mr Zuckerberg did not say that either the DoJ or FBI ordered them specifically to suppress or block that specific story; the two companies took separate and differing enforcement actions willingly in an action that was likely a result of the intense criticism their platforms received for handling of the issue in 2016.
There’s also no reason to believe that the Hunter Biden story would have had a significant effect on the 2020 election, where Mr Trump lost several states he won previously in 2016 and the issue of Covid-19 dominated many Americans’ concerns. Even to this day, Mr Biden’s son has not been formally charged with a crime, nor has he been invesitgated for any of the claims that conservatives have made stemming from his laptop. He remains under a DoJ investigation related to his tax filings as well as for potentially making a false statement while purchasing a firearm.
Mr Trump has never conceded the 2020 race even after his legal efforts failed to gain any traction in alleging or proving widespread fraud and instead resulted in the suspension of his lead attorney’s law license. He personally remains under investigation for his business dealings in New York as well as a criminal probe being led by the DoJ over alleged illegal retention of presidential records including classified documents.
It was reported by The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman as early as a few months in to Joe Biden’s presidency that the ex-president was telling supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort, which has since been raided by the FBI, that he would soon be reinstated as president.
