Former president Donald Trump reacted angrily when Fox News host Bret Baier confronted him and told him directly that he had lost the 2020 presidential election.
Baier asked the former president in a sit-down interview how he would win back independent suburban female voters who had drifted from the Republican Party.
The twice-indicted and twice-impeached former president responded by repeating the lie that he did not lose the 2020 presidential election.
“First of all, I won in 2020,” he said. “Let’s get that straight. I won in 2020.”
However, Baier interrupted Mr Trump’s tirade to try and correct him even as the former president continued speaking, repeating long-debunked lies about footage that allegedly shows people stuffing ballot boxes.
“You lost the 2020 election,” Baier said. “There were lawsuits, more than 50 of them, by your lawyers, some of them in front of judges, judges that you appointed that came up with no evidence.”
Mr Trump repeated his claims throughout the interview and falsely claimed that the state of Wisconsin “practically admitted it was rigged.” Baier countered that investigations did no show widespread voter fraud.
“They found fewer than 475 cases,” he said.
“They were counting ballots, not the authenticity of the ballot,” Mr Trump said. “The ballots were fake ballots. This was a very rigged election.”
Baier then tried to circle back to his original question and ask Mr Trump if this is how he would make a case to the aforementioned independent suburban female voter.
“We’re off to winning an election, and I think we’re winning very well,” he said.
Baier’s challenge to Mr Trump’s claims about the election being stolen came after Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems settled a lawsuit that the company which makes voting machines had filed against the cable news giant for $787.5m. Dominion had filed the lawsuit and claimed that the network defamed the company by giving a platform to conspiracy theorists who spread lies that Dominion engaged in widespread voter fraud and that Fox failed to challenge the lies about the company.
Shortly after the settlement, the cable news giant parted ways with Tucker Carlson, one of its most-watched hosts. Carlson had repeatedly parroted lies about the 2020 presidential election.
Mr Trump is also currently facing an investigation led by the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, for his attempts to overturn the election in that state in 2020.
Mr Tump’s interview with Baier was the first one that he conducted with the Rupert Murdoch-owned network since his arraignment in a federal court in Miami. Mr Trump pleaded not guilty to the 37 charges that an indictment that a grand jury supervised by Special Counsel Jack Smith handed down.
Mr Smith is also in charge of investigating Mr Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, including his actions on and leading up to the January 6 riot wherein supporters of Mr Trump broke into the US Capitol to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election results.
