Fox News Just Hammered the Final Nail in the Coffin of Trump’s Election Lie

Former President Donald Trump’s claim the 2020 election was stolen from him has been debunked time and time again over the last several years. Unlike more convincing conspiracy theories — I remain suspicious of Finland — the rigged election claim wasn’t hard to disprove.

First, the theory was silly on its face: U.S. elections are famously free and fair. Trump has long declared elections he lost as stolen, and has never provided a whiff of evidence to support those claims. He pledged during the 2016 campaign that if he lost he would say the election was rigged. He pledged the same during the 2020 campaign. When he did lose in 2020, he made good on that promise. It fueled a violent riot at the U.S. Capitol. The theory was completely made up. All of this was foreseeable.

Trump’s claims were put to the test in court. And sure enough, dozens of judges across the political spectrum, including ones Trump appointed, rejected his attempts to overturn the election. His infamous effort to compel Georgia’s Republican election officials to find exactly enough votes to give him the state fell on deaf ears, and is now the subject of a criminal investigation. A team of researchers his own campaign hired to prove the election was stolen failed to find any evidence it was.

And now, the final nail in the coffin: Fox News just paid Dominion Voting Systems a historic sum of $787.5 million because it could not find evidence to support the stolen election claims. The voting machines company had sued the cable news network for defamation over its promotion of that theory, one flimsy pillar of which was that Dominion, and another voting tech company, Smartmatic, changed millions of votes from Trump to Joe Biden.

Of course, if the stolen election claims were at all true, Fox News could have argued them as a defense against the Dominion suit. They were not true. Fox News had to shell out nearly one billion dollars because of how not-true they were.

Trump appeared to understand that this case was a test of his claims. In posts on his social media platform Truth Social, the former president urged Fox News to defend the stolen election theory during the trial. No doubt Dominion’s lawyers would have loved that. Not only would such a defense have flown in the face of all evidence, it would have also contradicted the admissions of Fox News hosts and executives in their sworn depositions.

An extraordinary amount of money has by now been wasted in an effort to prove Trump’s crackpot theory that he won an election he lost by seven million votes. All that money has done is build a mountain of evidence disproving the theory.

Still, it has persisted in prominent places. Fox News, for one, has consistently promoted the claims. We know, as a result of the Dominion suit, that Fox’s campaign to promote the theory came despite hosts and executives at the network admitting privately that it was insane.

That somehow has not stopped top hosts like Tucker Carlson from questioning the election on air to this day. Election denialism is pervasive at the network. Just look at my interview with Pete Hegseth from 2021, when my question about who won the election prompted a meltdown from the Fox News host.

One would hope that the massive settlement agreed to by Fox News — and other potential payouts from dangerous cases that still loom — would compel the network to clean up its act. Don’t count on it. A key revelation of the Dominion suit is that Fox is terrified of its audience and will sell that audience lies in order to keep them tuned in.

The dangerous incentives have not gone away. Trump is still the most powerful person in the Republican Party and is still pushing the stolen election theory. Polling consistently finds a shocking majority of Republicans believe the 2020 election wasn’t fair. Despite there being more evidence to debunk that belief than flat-earthism, it remains alive and well thanks to Trump and institutions like Fox News that are too scared to correct him.

Fox News paid a steep cost for that fear. The hope now is that the network doesn’t make the same $787.5 million mistake in 2024.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.