The president’s allies quickly closed ranks behind Sidney Powell and her pro-Trump conspiracy theory, accusing the Fox host of betrayal.
Sidney Powell, an election lawyer for President Trump, has laid out a conspiracy theory that voting machines were hacked and millions of votes were stolen from the president.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York TimesNY TIMES
By Jeremy W. Peters
Nov. 20, 2020
For more than a week, a plain-spoken former federal prosecutor named Sidney Powell made the rounds on right-wing talk radio and cable news, facing little pushback as she laid out a conspiracy theory that Venezuela, Cuba and other “communist” interests had used a secret algorithm to hack into voting machines and steal millions of votes from President Trump.
She spoke mostly uninterrupted for nearly 20 minutes on Monday on the “Rush Limbaugh Show,” the No. 1 program on talk radio. Hosts like Mark Levin, who has the fourth-largest talk radio audience, and Lou Dobbs of Fox Business praised her patriotism and courage.
So it came as most unwelcome news to the president’s defenders when Tucker Carlson, host of an 8 p.m. Fox News show and a confidant of Mr. Trump, dissected Ms. Powell’s claims as unreliable and unproven.
“What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” Mr. Carlson said on Thursday night, his voice ringing with incredulity in a 10-minute monologue at the top of his show. “Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of government.” But, he said, when he invited Ms. Powell on his show to share her evidence, she became “angry and told us to stop contacting her.”
The response was immediate, and hostile. The president’s allies in conservative media and their legions of devoted Trump fans quickly closed ranks behind Ms. Powell and her case on behalf of the president, accusing the Fox host of betrayal.
“How quickly we turn on our own,” said Bo Snerdley, Mr. Limbaugh’s producer, in a Twitter post that was indicative of the backlash against Mr. Carlson. “Where is the ‘evidence’ the election was fair?”
The backlash against Mr. Carlson and Fox for daring to exert even a moment of independence underscores how little willingness exists among Republicans to challenge the president and his false narrative about the election he insists was stolen. Among conservative media voices and outlets, there’s generally not just a lack of willingness — they have proved this month to be Mr. Trump’s most reflexive defenders.
For months before the election, as Mr. Trump spread disinformation about the reliability of mail-in ballots, Republicans largely avoided contradicting him and insisted that his concerns about fraud were not entirely unreasonable. And in the weeks since election night, when Mr. Trump falsely declared himself the winner and then refused to accept President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, the acknowledgments that the race is settled have come mostly from former officials like President George W. Bush, or from a few current office holders, like Senator Mitt Romney, who have not been afraid to air their differences with Mr. Trump.
The same fear that grips elected Republicans — getting on the wrong side of voters who adore Mr. Trump but have little affection for the Republican Party — has kept conservative media largely in line. And that has created a right-wing media bubble that has grown increasingly disconnected from the most basic facts about American government in recent weeks, including who will be inaugurated as president on Jan. 20, 2021.
In the hours after Mr. Carlson’s monologue, word of which spread quickly across social media, Mr. Trump’s supporters not only went after Mr. Carlson but also Fox News. The network has become a source of particular frustration with many on the right after taking a more skeptical view of Mr. Trump’s claims about voter fraud and refusing to reconsider its call on election night that Mr. Biden would win Arizona.
That decision, which proved correct, deeply angered the president and led him to start promoting some of Fox’s smaller competitors on cable like Newsmax and One America News Network as more suitable alternatives for his large and loyal following.
Roosh Valizadeh, a writer and podcast host who supports the president, summed up the anger aimed at Fox by many on the right, saying, “As long as Tucker Carlson works for Fox News, he can’t be fully trusted.”
All week on networks like Newsmax and OANN and talk radio programs, the president’s supporters have been given a steady diet of interviews with Trump allies, campaign officials and news stories that promote allegations of fraud with little or no context.
One lawyer who is assisting the Trump campaign in its efforts, Lin Wood, went unquestioned this week on Mr. Levin’s show when he made the fantastical claim that Mr. Trump had won the election with 70 percent of the vote. A story that OANN broadcast on Friday afternoon falsely declared, “The state of Michigan is back in play,” giving credence to Mr. Trump’s extraordinary but almost certainly unsuccessful efforts to delay certification of the vote in Detroit.
Republican officials have remained mostly measured and muted in their response, even after the conspiratorial and unsubstantiated claims floated by Ms. Powell, Rudolph W. Giuliani and other members of Mr. Trump’s legal team at a news conference on Thursday. Republicans like Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who said that Ms. Powell’s accusations were “absolutely outrageous,” were the exception.
Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review and sometimes critic of the president who called his refusal to concede “absurd and sophomoric,” said that whether it was a Republican politician or a talk-show host, breaking the will that many Trump supporters have to believe he is the rightful winner was extremely difficult.
“They want it to be true,” Mr. Lowry said. “On top of that, there’s an enormous credibility gap and radical distrust of other sources of information. And that’s compounded by the fact that the president has no standards and is surrounded by these clownish people who will say anything. It’s a toxic stew.”
Mr. Lowry added that he thought Mr. Carlson’s words were “admirable” and had told the Fox host so himself. “It’s one thing for people who’ve been opposed to Trump all along, or mixed, to say something like that,” Mr. Lowry said. “It’s another thing for a leader of the populist wing of the conservative movement to call it out.”
A question for conservative media that are more independent of Mr. Trump is how much of the market the unabashedly pro-Trump media dominates in the future. Some scholars said they expected that audience to be substantial.
“Drudge and Fox can try to pull back from the abyss,” said Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies conservative media. “But the audience is going to get what it wants and reward those who give it to them.”
Mr. Carlson is no ordinary Trump critic. He has been one of the president’s most aggressive defenders in prime time, especially when it came to standing up for Mr. Trump as he attacked African-American politicians, athletes and the racial justice activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. He has also generally bought into the disproved notion that voter fraud is a widespread problem — a popular position with Mr. Trump and on Mr. Carlson’s network.
He has not been shy in criticizing aspects of the president’s policies he disagrees with, whether the bombing raid in Iraq that killed Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani, or Mr. Trump’s failure to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously when it started spreading last winter. But he has never gone out on a limb like this, with the president and his followers so besieged.
Mr. Carlson, no doubt aware that many in his audience, including possibly the president himself, would not like what they were hearing, walked a fine line on Thursday night. He insisted that he and his producers “took Sidney Powell seriously,” and that he had invited her on the show to present her evidence.
P.S.
Carlson on Friday once again challenged Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell (right) to produce evidence proving her allegation that millions of votes cast in favor of the president were fraudulently switched. The Fox News host responded to Powell, who earlier on Friday accused Carlson of being 'very insulting, demanding, and rude.' Powell made the comments during a phone-in appearance on Maria Bartiromo's Fox Business Network show. 'We've heard from a lot of people about that segment, including people in the White House and people close to the president,' Carlson said on Friday, referencing his remarks on Thursday about Powell. 'Like us, they have concluded this election was not fair. Like us, they are willing to believe any explanation for what happened,' Carlson said. He then added: 'Like us, they have not seen a single piece of evidence showing that software changed votes.' Carlson said that while it 'might have happened,' no evidence has been produced to prove it happened. 'And by "they," we are including other members of Donald Trump's own legal team. They have not seen Powell's evidence either - no testimony from employees inside the software companies, no damning internal documents, no copies of the software itself, so that's where we are.'