So Trump was right: the election was rigged. And our next one will be too

Rod Liddle

Sunday September 26 2021, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times

To what extent, do you think, is Joe Biden abiding by his solemn election pledge to “undo the moral and national shame of the previous administration”? You can judge for yourself by the television pictures of terrified Haitian refugees on the US-Mexico border being horse-whipped by mounted American rangers.

Trump did not do anything like that. If he had attempted to, Hollywood and the partisan coastal media would have imploded in a plasma of outrage. And yet Biden has largely escaped their censure.

I’m not sure, either, that the little old business in Afghanistan entirely banished America’s moral and national shame. Nor Biden’s inability to remember where the hell he is or who he is talking to; nor his geopolitical pig ignorance or his tendency to doze off at crucial moments. I think, in answer to my original question, that America’s “moral and national shame” is absolutely thriving under the present incumbent, perhaps hitting levels not seen since James Buchanan was in office.

The American public is slowly waking up to the fact that they are being led by an ineffectually devious, senile halfwit. Donald Trump is back in the lead in the opinion polls. Imagine how awful a president must be if people would rather that sack of meat with mittens were back in charge.

Soon the public will wake up to something even more unpleasant and sinister: that the last presidential election was a fraud, rigged by big business, the labour unions and, more than anything, the media and the tech companies. If that election had taken place in any other country, it would have been called “unfree”. And, as more and more evidence emerges, it terrifies me that the same thing could happen here.

What, you argue, the BBC deliberately withholds stories damaging to its preferred party or candidate? Facebook and co refuse to carry news stories harmful to the opposition because they class them as “false news”? Yes, I think you see my point.

We already knew, even as Biden was declaring victory, that Facebook and Twitter had cut off Donald Trump’s access to the electorate. He was deliberately rendered voiceless. Before then, they — and the national media — had smothered stories alleging the Biden family’s peddling of influence and Biden’s crackhead son and his dubious business interests in Ukraine. False news, we were informed. Nope, not all of it was false at all, it transpired.

What we didn’t know until we were told in February this year, courtesy of Time magazine, was that there actually was a conspiracy — a secret coalition of chief executives, labour unions, left-wing pressure groups and media companies — to manage what information was available to the voting public. Its aim, as The Wall Street Journal put it, was to “suppress unwanted elements of US political conversation”. What a wonderful phrase.

Time magazine reported this as if the cabal — it called the arrangement a cabal — had been acting heroically. To save the US public from making the same mistake again and electing that Brobdingnagian boor — and to do so by suppressing stories favourable to him.

Now we discover that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was also conspiring against the president. Twice Milley called Chinese diplomats to let them know that he would countermand any order from Trump to attack China — which seems to a lot of US conservatives to be an act of pure treason. Milley also went behind his president’s back to connive with the Democrat leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

The reasoning for this was that Trump was “unhinged” — a familiar notion peddled by the media for the four years of his presidency. Was he? I don’t know. He didn’t seem terribly hinged to me, but then Americans rarely do. But more unhinged than your average American — or Joe Biden? Whatever the case, that election one year ago was plainly rigged. Not by fraudulent postal votes. But by an affluent elite conspiring, brutally at times, to ensure that the American public heard only one side of the story.

What worries me most is that so few liberal commentators seem capable of understanding that this was a grotesque manipulation of democracy. And yet surely they must see it, no matter how appalling Trump seemed to them (and indeed, quite often, to me). Instead, those very acts that subverted democracy are depicted as valorous.

The author of that article in Time said the conspirators “were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it”. Wow. Isn’t that a little chilling? And are you looking forward to a “fortified” general election over here?

● What a pleasure it was to hear the government’s Cop26 spokesperson, Allegra Stratton, explaining on the BBC’s World at One why she had yet to buy an electric car.

Apparently it’s because she has a bad leg.

Similarly, I was stung quite nastily by a wasp last week. That will certainly prevent me from replacing my boiler with a heat pump.

It is important that we take climate change seriously, then. But not too seriously.