WASHINGTON — The 2020 election just won’t go away, and not just because of President Donald Trump and his primetime address Thursday evening.
Some of the president’s prominent allies on Capitol Hill are eagerly fanning the flames ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
“Who won the 2020 election?” Raw Story asked Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) at the Capitol this week.
“Donald Trump,” the Alabama gubernatorial candidate told Raw Story.
“Are you joking?” Raw Story pressed. “Or are you for real?”
“Well, he legitimately won it,” Tuberville said. “Now, they cheated him.”
While Trump’s pick to replace Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton, turned heads Wednesday for refusing to say Joe Biden won the 2020 election — “Joe Biden was certified as the president of the United States,” Clayton testified — that opinion is more common than most think in Washington.
That’s especially the case at the U.S. Capitol.
“Who won in 2020?” Raw Story asked Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).
“Joe Biden was president for four years,” the former chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee told Raw Story. “I think it's kind of obvious, isn't it?”
“But a lot of these nominees won't say he won it legitimately,” Raw Story pressed. “They kind of use language like you.”
“He became president,” Johnson replied. “That's all you need to know.”
“Are the results still a question mark?” Raw Story asked.
“There are all kinds of irregularities in the 2020 election that have not been adequately investigated. There's no doubt about that,” Johnson said. “We have not adequately investigated all the irregularities, whether it's in Wisconsin, whether it's Georgia or whether it's Arizona. We really should.”
It’s the same on the House side of the Capitol.
“The 2020 election — is it settled?” Raw Story asked Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-MD). “Do you still have questions?”
“There are many questions about the 2020 election, whether there were illegitimate mail-in ballots counted,” Harris told Raw Story.
“Do you think Biden was legitimate?” Raw Story pressed.
“Uh, probably,” Harris said after a pause. “But I think there's still questions about mail-in ballots. I think the president is absolutely right. They’re subject to a lot of fraud. More mail-in ballots than we've ever had in Maryland. We indiscriminately mailed out mail-in ballots to everyone, including people who had been dead, who had moved, etc.”
After he faced off on C-SPAN with DNI nominee Clayton Wednesday, Raw Story caught up with Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) to get his perspective on the Trump administration beating the 2020 election denial drum louder and louder these days.
“It's a classic characteristic of a personalist authoritarian structure that admission to the inner circle requires self-effacing recitation of a known lie,” Ossoff told Raw Story.
The 2020 election is in the rearview mirror for most of us, but it’s increasingly becoming a centerpiece of this administration.
After sending former DNI Tulsi Gabbard to oversee the FBI raid of the Fulton County election HQ in January, in recent weeks FBI Director Kash Patel’s reassigned 260 FBI agents who he’s tasked with reinvestigating the 2020 presidential election. That comes on the heels of Patel firing agents previously tasked with investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Now, as the midterms near and with President Trump reshuffling his top advisors, Democrats fear their GOP counterparts are preparing to propel election deniers to the top levels of government.
“What do you make of the inability of some of these nominees to say, or the refusal to say, who won the 2020 election?” Raw Story asked.
“The Trump dictate, the Trump mantra will not accept anyone saying he lost the 2020 election,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said. “It's worrying, because it shows their total lack of independence.”
As for Trump’s primetime address Thursday night, Blumenthal says it’s more about depressing turnout this November than it is about rewriting the historical record.
“He's trying to suppress the vote,” Blumenthal said.
Sowing such discord into the heart of the American experiment — free and fair elections — goes beyond the everyday hyper-partisanship now common in the nation’s capital.
“This is a terrible disservice. We literally have the president of the United States at war with our democracy,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) told Raw Story. “He’s using 2020 as a pretext to attack the 2026 midterms, because he knows he's a loser.”