Donald Trump refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden at CNN’s controversial town hall event and called his defeat “rigged” and “sad.”
The one-term president was immediately confronted by moderator Kaitlan Collins over his election lies and was asked to finally admit that he had been fairly and legally beaten by Mr Biden.
“Unless you are a very stupid person you see what happens…most people understand what happened, it was a rigged election and it was a shame we had to go through it,” he told Collins.
She then asked him to acknowledge that he lost the election, telling him that he and his supporters had lost more than 60 lawsuits across the country.
Mr Trump then cited claims by “True the Vote”, a conservative vote monitoring organisation, and said that they had “found millions of votes on government cameras where they were stuffing ballot boxes, it is a sad thing for our country and for the world.”
Collins told him that the false election claims had already been debunked by Republican election officials across the country.
Mr Trump then claimed that “people were afraid to take on the issue” and that “we have elections that were horrible in this country”, citing Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta, all cities in swing states that went to Mr Biden.
Trump pushes the big lie during his very first response. Kaitlan Collins interjects that "it was not a rigged election." Trump responds by lying some more. pic.twitter.com/NZaOAk9mHc
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 11, 2023
“There is no evidence of that,” she told him.
The event, which has been criticised for giving Mr Trump’s election lies and baseless conspiracy theories live airtime, took place in front of an audience of 400 Republican and GOP-leaning independent voters in New Hampshire on Wednesday night.
Later, when Mr Trump claimed the election was “rigged” while talking about the border wall, Collins told him, “The election was not rigged Mr President, you can’t keep saying that all night long.”
