Tim Graham tried to justify right-wing election denialism in an April 1 post as part of a discussion Bill Maher’s show about the kerfuffle over NBC hiring, then firing, lying ex-RNC chair (and election denier) Ronna McDaniel, about which the MRC has been greatly obsessed:
On Friday night’s Real Time, somehow the discussion of NBC/MSNBC hiring and quickly firing former RNC boss Ronna McDaniel turned into a discussion of the Communist Party. Bill Maher implied that McDaniel was more of a danger to democracy than the Communist Party USA ever was.
Maher’s opening question to columnist Fareed Zakaria and former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper: “How do you represent this large part of the country that does not believe the election was legitimate? How do you say to people ‘we want to include you, but we can’t deny that what you think is stupid’?”
This depends on the polling question. You can believe Biden was elected, that he won the Electoral College, and still say “no” if the question hinges on “legitimate.” Because the media and Big Tech suppressed damaging stories like the Hunter Biden laptop – which our MRC poll showed could have swung the swing states to Trump.
This is especially important when they’re discussing freedom of speech, because powerful forces worked to suppress free speech right before the election.
Actually, Tim, you can’t claim that Biden won the election if you deny the election was legitimate. And that “MRC poll” you talk about was conducted by a biased right-wing pollster — designed to promote a different strain of election denierism, based on the pollsters asking the right questions to get the result the MRC was paying it for — so questions of legitimacy about your election fraud conspiracies are more legitimate to ask about than the election itself. And note that Graham refused to outright state that Biden is our legitimately elected president.
Graham then complained that Republicans are being called election deniers because, you know, they deny the election and rioted at the Capitol to try and overturn it:
Maher implied that since Trump is presently leading, that implies half the country thinks Trump won last time. That’s an energetic stretch. It’s likely there are Biden voters who are switching in current polls due to Biden’s mismanagement of the country. They’re hardly “election deniers.”
The real sticking point here is that Trump supporters who violently rioted at the Capitol on the day the presidential election was certified have given evidence to the Left that anyone who opposes Biden is “anti-democratic.” Our media thinks that if you rig the election the right way, you haven’t rigged the election, you “fortified” it. You saved democracy by rigging it.
Well, attempting to violently overthrow the government because a certain party leader is incapable of accepting he lost the election does demonstrate a certain anti-democratic attitude. And Graham is certainly not going to remind you that the son of his boss played a role in that attempted insurrection, which very much suggests that his employer was on board with the riot on an organizational level.
Graham’s carping about “rigging” the election linked to a post he wrote in 2021 complaining about a Time magazine article about how a broad coalition of activists prepared for the possibility that Trump would refuse to concede the election and worked to shore up democratic institutions during an election hampered by a pandemic.
Graham refused to admit that Trump had done anything wrong in refusing to concede that he lost or inciting a riot at the Capitol. This tells us that he does, in fact, buy into those same anti-democratic tactics that he whines Republicans are being (accurately) tarred with — and nothing he said changed that narrative.