Trump’s Lies Were Influenced By ‘Dumbest Man On the Internet’


A far-right conspiracy website founded by the “dumbest man on the internet” fueled many of the conspiracy theories Donald Trump cited in his ongoing efforts to overturn his election loss. The Former Guy pressured Justice Department officials to question the election results as he leaned on various state officials to nullify his losses, according to notes taken at the time by his deputy attorney general, and he chastised law enforcement officials for not reading sites like the discredited Gateway Pundit.
A former senior White House official and another person with direct knowledge of the situation told The Daily Beast that Trump once handed them a printout from the conspiracy website and asked them to track down its ridiculous fraud claim, and they saw him on multiple occasions holding printed-out articles from Gateway Pundit in the White House, including the Oval Office. “I didn’t really do anything about it,” the ex-official said. “I think I threw it out. Maybe I recycled it.”

“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” Trump told acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and deputy attorney General Richard Donoghue in a December 27, 2020, phone conversation, according to recently revealed documents.
Trump told officials that they were not “following the internet the way I do” as he tried to subvert the election. He was referring in part to conspiracy site The Gateway Pundit. https://t.co/feXn3nlkOv
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) August 4, 2021
“Lindell said he showed Trump an article from The American Report, a conspiracy theory website that’s fringe even by the standards of Trump’s late presidency, that purports to show that China and a host of other entities hacked the election through an analysis of IP addresses,” The Daily Beast reported at the time. “But the president seemed just as, if not more, interested in the pictures on the article, rather than the text or the chart.”
https://twitter.com/humanedick/status/1422406060455997442
Before his suspension, Trump promoted Gateway Pundit content on his Twitter feed in the weeks ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection, such as one late-December article that falsely claimed statistical anomalies in Arizona and another article that used the wrong total for nationwide voter participation to claim the vote totals were impossibly high. In yet another, Trump hyped a Gateway Pundit article featuring claims from a debunked forensic report that was presented as part of a lawsuit in Antrim County, Michigan. Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro sent a Gateway Pundit article to Trump’s legal team baselessly alleging ties between Venezuela and Dominion Voting Systems, which attorney Sidney Powell infamously cited during a bizarre post-election news conference.
Read the full profile at The Daily Beast.
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