'What are the consequences?' Trump insists the media stole the election from him in new rant

Donald Trump offered a convoluted explanation to claim the 2020 election had been stolen from him in a Thursday morning rant.

The former president misrepresented internal deliberations at Twitter about a decision to block users from sharing an October 2020 New York Post story containing material from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, which Trump and his allies claim was requested by the FBI, but so far no evidence has emerged of any government involvement in that decision.

"So, if the FBI illegally suppressed all of the really bad information on the Biden family (laptop!) at a level never seen before, ('it was Russian disinformation,' they said), while at the same time not letting the many positive things accomplished by 'Trump' get out to the public, but would instead put out 'bad stuff,' that would be the very definition of the Government’s RIGGING of an Election," Trump posted on his Truth Social website. "Pollsters projected this Scam made a difference of Millions of votes. What are the CONSEQUENCES?"

Google search results from October 2020 show that interest in the Hunter Biden story increased after social media companies restricted reports about the materials apparently hacked from his laptop, but it's impossible to know with any certainty whether additional reporting would have cut into Joe Biden's vote totals -- despite the findings of a conservative polling outfit.

The Media Research Center published a poll just after Trump's loss claiming that “full awareness of the Hunter Biden scandal would have led 9.4% of Biden voters to abandon the Democratic candidate, flipping all six of the swing states he won to Trump, giving the President 311 electoral votes.”

But those findings were based on a misleading and highly tendentious question that assumes baseless claims about Trump-pushed conspiracy theory are, in fact, true: “At the time you cast your vote for president, were you aware that evidence exists, including bank transactions the FBI is currently investigating, that directly links Joe Biden and his family to a corrupt financial arrangement between a Chinese company with connections to the Chinese Communist Party that was secretly intended to provide the Biden family with tens of millions of dollars in profits?”

It's not clear what policy successes Trump believes were suppressed by media outlets before his election loss.