Donald Trump knew he lost

| 7:00 pm EST February 14, 2023
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“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.” This cynical piece of advice comes courtesy of humorist Mark Twain, and it appears Donald Trump is happy to follow it. A new revelation about Trump and the Big Lie shows that Trump sought to learn the facts about possible fraud in the November 2020 election, only to replace them with tall tales after getting disappointed by reality.

Soon after the election, the Trump campaign paid the Berkeley Research Group (BRG), an outside research firm, to investigate his election fraud claims. The work involved about a dozen specialists seeking possible irregularities in six states, ranging from voter machine malfunctions, ballot harvesting, dead people voting, and more. Despite BRG exhaustively looking for “anything under the sun,” they found nothing of note, according to reporting this weekend from The Washington Post.

After the top folks at BRG presented their findings to Trump and then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on the phone in December 2020, the two insurrectionists refused to believe the independent fact-finding and objective analysis they commissioned. Apparently, some of Trump’s advisors were hoping that such a report would put the Big Lie to bed, but those advisors obviously didn’t know their boss.

The BRG report, of course, does not stand alone as some dubious outlier. January 6th Committee testimony revealed that many Trump advisors told him he lost while searching in vain for any source that would support Trump’s anti-democratic claims. Trump’s maniacal pursuit of legitimizing the Big Lie also got knocked down in court countless times.

As President John Adams admitted, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Twice impeached, rejected for a second term, and facing possibly multiple indictments, Trump is learning this important lesson about the nature and power of facts the hard way.