Website Run by 'Dumbest Man on the Internet' Helped Fuel Trump's Effort to Cancel Democracy

[Nevilledog]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-trumps-effort-to-cancel-democracy-was-fueled-by-gateway-pundit

According to contemporaneous Justice Department notes taken during the end of Donald Trump’s time in office, the then-president directly and repeatedly berated his top federal law enforcers to back his election-fraud lies. But when they wouldn’t support his anti-democratic crusade, Trump resorted to accusing his senior DOJ officials of not being as extremely online as he was.

For starters, he was chastising them for not reading enough of The Gateway Pundit.

“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” then-President Trump told acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue during a Dec. 27 phone conversation, according to the recently released DOJ documents.

During Trump and Republicans’ months-long, and at times deadly, blitz to nullify President Joe Biden’s decisive victory in the 2020 election, the 45th U.S. president and his allies consumed and regurgitated a lot of garbage information and unhinged conspiracy theories from “the internet.” And one of the websites Trump was specifically citing was the ultra-right-wing and habitually wrong Gateway Pundit; the president was known to sometimes brandish printed pages of the website around the West Wing after the 2020 election.

The Gateway Pundit’s small role in Trump’s endeavor to weaponize the DOJ against the American electoral process underscores just how easily a discredited far-right media site established a pipeline to the decision-making of the then most powerful person on Earth. It also shows how this one website—founded by a guy repeatedly dubbed the “dumbest man on the internet”—managed to play a part in fueling the efforts that brought the country to the brink of democratic rupture.

*snip*

[wryter2000]

1. What makes them think it's over?

"During Trump and Republicans’ months-long, and at times deadly, blitz to nullify President Joe Biden’s decisive victory..."

What makes the Daily Beast think they've stopped?

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Their attempt to stop Biden's victory is now toothless

The Arizona recount isn't going to nullify or overturn it. It will, however, be used as ammunition in their attempt to stop democracy (and Democrats) in 2022 and beyond, with their bullshit state laws designed to suppress the Democratic vote.

[tanyev]

2. Of course the Dumbest Man in the White House would be a fan of the Dumbest Man on the Internet.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. That was one of the worrying things about TFG

You know that Democrats are too busy actually governing to be distracted by internet noise (or DU - we do not influence government policy, which is overall, a good thing). And with traditional Republicans, that would basically be the case too - they might keep a partisan eye on it, to see what "the base" is saying, or being persuaded to think, but it wouldn't be their source for "facts". TFG was the kind of Fox News viewer who inhaled as much bullshit as they, or the internet equivalents, could lay before him.