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But she also remains one of the most prominent voices on Fox News and Fox Business. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to guess why.
On Sunday, Bartiromo welcomed the new leadership of the Republican National Committee to his weekly Fox News show. It was an opportunity to debunk election denialism and explore all sorts of topics, including how it has been organized within the Republican Party. But instead, Bartiromo wanted to make sure the party was focused. sufficient About eradicating the imaginary threat of fraud.
Before we get to Bartiromo’s question, let’s hammer home the latter point a little more firmly. He said it has been more than three years since the 2020 election, but there is no evidence of rampant fraud taking place on Election Day, including the use of drop boxes, the use of mail-in ballots, and the use of illegal in-person voting. There’s nothing more than that. One way we know the rampant fraud theory has failed is that so many Trump supporters, desperate not to offend, instead believe that the election was “rigged” against him. That’s what I’m talking about. (That didn’t happen either.)
But Bartiromo is too deep in the water to get that kind of fresh air. So she started a conversation with RNC Chair Michael Whatley and co-chair Lara Trump (who is also the former president’s daughter-in-law) about how the money raised at the former president’s big event on Saturday should be used. I started by asking if they planned to use it. .
“Every dollar we raise will be spent on two important core missions of the RNC,” Whatley responded. “It’s about getting the vote and protecting the ballot.” Every dollar is spent “to achieve the goal,” he said.
Bartiromo responded, “Getting people to vote is important, but ensuring we have a safe election is something that a lot of people want to know what you’re doing.”
Get-out-the-vote (GOTV) — i.e., ensuring your supporters can vote — teeth important! And while many people (read Bartiromo) want to know how the Republican Party ensures “secure elections,” they say that U.S. elections are already secure under any meaningful definition. Given that, it’s not a priority. The weekend before the 2020 election, I was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and saw Joe Biden’s team rallying voters and Donald Trump calling on people to “secure the election.” Who do you think won in Pennsylvania?
Lara Trump was elevated to her new position in part because her father-in-law wanted to reinforce the idea that her 2020 loss was unfair, and she agreed with Bartiromo.
“When you talk about election integrity, that’s extremely important,” she said. “Other than getting the results, that’s what we’re most focused on.” This approach also failed to get the job done four years ago.
Lara Trump continued, “There has never been an election integrity division at the RNC.” “We can put all of our resources into this department if we have to. And with harvests like last night and marches like ours, we now have the ability to not only put poll watchers in place; , we’ve got funding to make sure we train our poll workers and make sure we have attorneys in every precinct we need across this country.”
Whatley added to this a little later, noting that his party filed the lawsuit with the aim of giving his party a better position during the election.
He added: “We have hired and trained tens of thousands of observers, and we have hired and trained thousands of lawyers to ensure that they are present during voting and vote counting.” “I’m doing it,” he said.
Mr. Whatley’s claims regarding election litigation certainly have some significance for the party. If Republicans can cut off avenues to make it easier for Democrats to vote, it would be a benefit to Trump, even if it would be detrimental to lowercase D democracy.
But having so many pollsters and lawyers is clearly a waste of time and money—with one exception, which I’ll get to later. There is no evidence that the type of in-person fraud that having poll watchers ostensibly suppressed was widespread in 2020. Trump usually doesn’t even claim there was. His rhetoric, and by extension his supporters, has focused on whether observers will be able to monitor vote-counting in the hours after the 2020 polls close, making it difficult for observers to monitor an objectively obscure process. They often ignored what the party was already prepared for.
But the exception here is Whatley’s comment that he is “in the room any time a vote is being taken.” The party had been barred from polling for decades under a consent decree reached after Republicans intimidated voters in New Jersey’s 1981 gubernatorial election. What if there were pro-Trump people in the room who challenged legitimate voters or discouraged them from voting in the first place? Again, it’s a loss for democracy and potentially for the Democratic Party as well.
“What we want is a fair, accurate, secure and transparent election,” Whatley said later. We’re going to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. ”
After a brief delay, President Trump urged people to register to vote. I sent an email Monday morning and received a response that seemed somewhat at odds with his mission as expressed by Lara Trump on Bartiromo’s show.
“Make no mistake about it: Your support and dedication are critical to our continued fight as Democrats continue to spread lies about election law,” it read. “You are now part of the team that will hold Democrats accountable.”
In this formulation, the fight is not against fraud. It’s about “lies about election law.” Perhaps he’s still worried about someone at the RNC alleging widespread fraud in the American election. Or maybe the language hasn’t been updated for the Trump-Whatley era yet.
It is unclear whether Ms. Bartiromo heard the words she felt needed to allay concerns about the sanctity of the election, but these concerns are also unfounded and derive primarily from President Trump’s anxiety over his 2020 loss. This is what I did. Republicans’ legal efforts are focused on making it harder, not easier, for some voters to vote, as fraud in American elections is already difficult.
The segment ended with Bartiromo raising another issue that is central to her views on American politics.
“Will the media be ready if the national security state interferes in elections for the third consecutive election?” she asked her guests.
Ms. Bartiromo, an executive at her employer, warned that Republican conspiracy theorists have also been in her ear and that they sometimes use her for messages. And sometimes it seems fair to think that she’s just repeating that kind of rhetoric of her own volition because she believes so.
Since 2020, Fox has paid for her (and her colleagues) to do so, settling a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million. Future costs will be covered by Republican donors.
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