Rigged

How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections

Mollie Hemingway

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781684512638
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER JUSTICE ON TRIAL Stunned by the turbulence of the 2020 election, millions of Americans are asking the forbidden question: what really happened? It was a devastating triple punch. Capping their four-year campaign to destroy the Trump presidency, the media portrayed a Democratic victory as necessary and inevitable. Big Tech, wielding unprecedented powers, vaporized dissent and erased damning reports about the Biden family's corruption. And Democratic operatives, exploiting a public health crisis, shamelessly manipulated the voting process itself. Silenced and subjected, the American people lost their faith in the system. RIGGED is the definitive account of the 2020 election. Based on Mollie Hemingway's exclusive interviews with campaign officials, reporters, Supreme Court justices, and President Trump himself, it exposes the fraud and cynicism behind the Democrats' historic power-grab.Rewriting history is a specialty of the radical left, now in control of America's political and cultural heights. But they will have to contend with the determination, insight, and eloquence of Mollie Hemingway. RIGGED is a reminder for weary patriots that truth is still the most powerful weapon. The stakes for our democracy have never been higher.

CHAPTER ONE Over Before It Began

When the Florida results started to come in, President Donald Trump and his campaign team were flying high. President Trump was performing two points better than he had in 2016 in a crucial bellwether state. He was on track to win the election.

On the evening of November 3, 2020, campaign manager Bill Stepien, deputy campaign manager Justin Clark, and other senior members of the re-election campaign assembled in a small room in the White House where they would get updates on election returns.

Historically used as a meeting room for the president and First Lady, the “Map Room” is situated on the south side of the first floor of the White House residence, named for the maps President Franklin D. Roosevelt studied there while commanding U.S. military forces during World War II. It was a fitting place to watch the night unfold.

For Election Night, the room, which usually featured antique mahogany furniture, a red sofa, and an oriental rug, was filled with four black tables pushed together in a large rectangle on which computers were set. Four large flat-screen televisions showing cable news coverage and incoming data were placed on one long side of the room. Top officials and Trump family members drifted in and out throughout the evening. Occasionally, when the crowd swelled with other guests, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows directed security to remove some people.

One floor up, four hundred of the top current and former Republican officials, ambassadors, donors, and journalists partied in the East Room of the White House, the largest room in the executive mansion and one frequently used to host receptions and events. The crowd spilled into some adjoining rooms. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was holding court, his entourage nearby. TV host Laura Ingraham was at the gathering, as was Judge Jeanine Pirro, also a TV host. Republican National Committee chair Ronna Romney McDaniel stopped by. The alcohol was flowing freely as guests dined on sliders and fries.

President Donald Trump and his family were stationed in the residences on the top floor, receiving regular updates from top officials and going between the floors to greet visitors and check on results.

The campaign team felt very good heading into Election Night. Their internal metrics showed that support for Trump wasn’t just surging, but dramatically surging in the closing days of the race.

The previous Sunday had been a whirlwind of campaign activity for Trump, with large and exuberant rallies in Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Florida, where he’d arrived at the Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport for a midnight gathering on Sunday night. The next day, Monday, Trump held another five rallies in Fayetteville, North Carolina; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Traverse City, Michigan; Kenosha, Wisconsin; and, finally, Grand Rapids, Michigan, the same city in which he’d spent the final hours of the 2016 campaign.

Reporters expressed surprise at Trump’s confidence, since they thought he had little to no shot at victory.¹ Then again, they hadn’t given him a chance of winning an election since he first began running for the presidency in 2015. The campaign had learned to disregard most of the media’s opinions. After four years of increasingly false narratives, the campaign staff felt that the media were more interested in willing Biden to victory than reflecting reality.

Trump’s energetic barnstorming of the country marked a huge contrast from the Biden campaign. The former vice president rarely strayed far from his house in Delaware after he became the presumptive nominee.² The Trump campaign mocked Biden, saying he was “staying in the basement,”³ while the Biden campaign said that Trump and Pence were imperiling public health.

Biden finally got on the road as the campaign came to a close. On November 2, Biden hit small events in Ohio and Pennsylvania. His final stop in Cleveland was at Burke Lakefront Airport, where masked guests in one hundred spaced-out vehicles honked in the place of polite applause.⁴ In Pennsylvania, he hosted small drive-in events in Allegheny County and Pittsburgh.

The last two weeks of the 2020 election had been the most normal anyone on the campaign had experienced in months. Just as Biden locked up his nomination in March, the country locked down in response to the coronavirus outbreak, a global pandemic that had spread across the world from its origin in Wuhan, China. The pandemic crushed the thriving economy, one of Trump’s major selling points as the country underwent what he liked to call a “blue-collar boom.”⁵ His deregulatory agenda, tax cuts, willingness to tackle illegal immigration to stop the flood of cheap labor into the country, and renegotiation of trade deals to strengthen industry had jump-started an economy that had been flagging throughout his predecessor’s two terms. But now, churches were forced to close, children were banned from school, and public gatherings were declared illegal.

Well before their man won the nomination, the Biden team had decided to make the election a referendum on Trump, mostly because abject hatred of Trump was the main—and perhaps the only—unifying issue in the Democratic Party. A passionate and well-financed “resistance” had formed the moment Trump won his first election, and it had become the soul of the Democratic Party. Before he was inaugurated, there were riots and attempts to keep the Electoral College from voting for Trump.⁶ Democratic operatives worked with bureaucrats inside the government to convince Americans that Trump hadn’t won fairly, but by colluding with Russia to steal the election.

There was chatter about using the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution—which gives the vice president and cabinet members the ability to remove the president if he is unable to serve—to get rid of Trump.⁷ On top of the talk, there were congressional investigations, a special counsel appointment, and a failed impeachment. None of these outlandish ploys worked, so this passionate and unified resistance had only one hope—and that was to defeat him in 2020.

The other reason the Biden camp wanted the campaign to be a referendum on Trump was because Biden was seventy-seven years old and hardly a dynamic candidate. Trump wasn’t too much younger, but, unlike Biden, he wasn’t obviously showing the effects of his age. On the trail, Biden frequently stumbled over his words and made embarrassing gaffes. Though Biden already had a reputation for verbal gaffes and defensiveness from the early days of his career in Washington nearly fifty years prior, by 2020 it seemed worse.⁸ Plus, the frequent flubs had helped derail his two previous runs for the highest office in the land.

COVID-19 provided the perfect justification to keep Biden off the trail. Everything was locked down. The only thing that even partially eased the limits on public gatherings was itself traumatic, a “summer of rage” in response to the killing of a suspected criminal by Minneapolis police. A bystander had taken video of the nearly ten minutes that a cop spent kneeling on George Floyd’s neck during arrest as he begged for mercy before dying. Over ten thousand protests erupted around the country, at least a thousand of which resulted in violent incidents or riots.⁹ Dozens of people were killed and billions of dollars of damages were reported.¹⁰ Thousands of businesses were lost to fires and looting. The media and their activist allies pushed the narrative that America was and is an irredeemably racist country and that the George Floyd video was just the latest proof of that reality. Despite the nationwide violence, the media insisted that the Black Lives Matter movement, which included calls to “defund the police,” was peaceful.¹¹

Throughout his first campaign and during much of his presidency, Trump was known for gathering massive and exuberant crowds. He gave freewheeling speeches where he tested messages, made jokes, and pushed his policy ideas. But over the course of this campaign, he couldn’t hold as many rallies, thanks in large part to the pandemic. COVID-19 hampered the Trump campaign and took the president out of his natural environment.

The few public events that the Biden campaign held didn’t go well for the former vice president. At a Biden rally in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, more Trump supporters showed up than Biden supporters. When Biden left, he was forced to drive through a crowd of Trump supporters whom he had earlier called “chumps.”¹²

Just a couple days later, more Trump supporters showed up than Biden supporters to a drive-in rally in Minnesota. An angry Biden yelled at them and called them “ugly” as they drowned out his speech.¹³

At an event in Toledo, Biden couldn’t be heard over the chants of “Four More Years!” from Trump supporters across the street.¹⁴ As Biden spoke to a group of people in their parked cars, enthusiastic Trump supporters blared horns and drowned him out with noise.

The same thing was happening at Biden rallies across the country. “Practically a Trump drive-in rally here now outside the Biden drive-in event,” CNN’s MJ Lee said of one Pennsylvania Biden stop.¹⁵

But now, with the Trump team assembled in the White House residence, all the campaigning was over. Election Day had finally arrived. Members of the Trump campaign thought they had left it all out on the field and were entering the contest in a strong position. They were confident that Election Day would crown them victors.

The Biden campaign saw matters differently. For them, Election Day had arrived two months prior. In fact, from their perspective, the election was over before the sun even rose on the East Coast that day. There was nothing left to play for; the election had already been won.

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Beginning with the election of Zachary Taylor in 1848, the presidential election was to be held on a single day nationwide. By law, all voters were to decide who would lead the country for the next four years on the “Tuesday after the first Monday in November.”¹⁶

The change to a single day of voting occurred out of concern for election integrity. The 1844 election, which had been spread out over more than a month, was rife with fraud and practices that put the election’s legitimacy into question. Voters also feared that election outcomes in states with earlier election dates were influencing how later states voted.¹⁷

But by 2020, the practice of Americans’ voting on the same day was a thing of the past, and Americans returned to what had been rejected in the 1840s—a lengthy window of time for elections.

That’s not to say that there had never been exceptions for those who needed them. States had long permitted limited absentee balloting for select citizens who could present legitimate reasons for why they were unable to go to the polls, such as military deployment.

But beginning in the late 1970s, restrictions were loosened. California was the first to allow “no excuse” absentee voting.¹⁸ States across the country would follow suit.

“No excuse” absentee voting allows citizens to cast their ballots early. With the widespread adoption of this practice in recent years, the United States can no longer be said to have an election day in the strict sense of the term. The country has a months-long voting season.

This was already true before 2020, when reforms increased the length of time in which Americans could cast a ballot to ludicrous proportions. North Carolinians, for example, could vote in the 2020 election before Labor Day, a full two months before Election Day and nearly a month before the two candidates had met for their first debate.¹⁹ The changes also obscured the deadline by which votes needed to be counted, a fixture of the system before 2020.

In 2016, absentee and mail-in ballots accounted for roughly 33 million of the 140 million ballots counted.²⁰ In 2020, more than 100 million of the 159 million ballots counted were cast prior to Election Day, including by early voting.²¹

The change was enough for former attorney general William Barr to sound the alarm about how widespread early, absentee, and mail-in voting was negatively affecting the voting public.²² Extending voting well beyond voting day “is like telling a jury in a 2-month trial that they can vote any time they want during the trial,” Barr said after the election in an interview at his home. “You can’t say it’s really a national consensus because people are all operating on a different set of facts.”

The 2020 election would see an even more important nineteenth-century electoral reform put on the chopping block: the move to a secret ballot that occurred in the late 1800s.

During the colonial period, there were many methods of voting, from using different-colored beans or corn to cast votes to viva voces, or voice votes. In the latter system, each voter’s name was called, and the voter was asked publicly before a judge, clerks, the candidates, and other voters whom he was voting for. The practice was abandoned in part because creditors would make their debtors vote for their preferred candidates, taking advantage of the public nature of the polls to ensure that debtors did their bidding.²³

But, as a rule, the colonies moved to paper ballots early on. Governor John Winthrop, one of the leading figures in founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony, abolished public voting in 1634.²⁴ By 1706, Pennsylvania had passed a law requiring the use of paper ballots, with provisions given for the illiterate. By the end of the Revolutio...