Donald Trump spent most of nearly 12 minutes lying about the 2020 presidential election while interviewer Brian Kilmeade repeatedly replied “right.”
Kilmeade said “right” to Trump 18 times in the transcript, by my count.
Of course, that didn’t represent all Kilmeade’s toadying. He also lobbed this softball:
KILMEADE: You -- with everything you've accomplished, you took over a military that was cut by 25 percent, that only had three brigades ready to fight. It was out of bullets. What have you done in the four years since you -- to change that?
Throughout the interview, Trump obsessed over the election and spewed anti-democratic lie after lie - validated by Kilmeade:
TRUMP: We have numerous local cases where you know, in some of the states that got rigged and robbed from us. But we won every one of them. We won Pennsylvania. We won Michigan. We won Georgia by a lot. We have a governor, Republican governor that's worse than a Democrat, he's terrible and he's hurting Kelly and David very badly, the Senators that are terrific people.
But -- and Wisconsin as you know, we have a case going on as we speak –
KILMEADE: Right.
FACT CHECK: Trump lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin.
Sure, Kilmeade made some half-hearted attempts to slightly distance himself:
KILMEADE: Do you worry about the country being divided as -- if it goes to inauguration and [the 77% of Trump supporters who think he won] still feel that way and you still feel that way?
TRUMP: No, I worry about the country having an illegitimate president, that's what I worry about. A president that lost and lost badly. This wasn't like a close election. You look at Georgia. We won Georgia big. We won Pennsylvania big. We won Wisconsin big. We won it big.
Kilmeade may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but even he’s got to know that Trump couldn’t care less about “the country having an illegitimate president. Even if Kilmeade hasn't figured out by now that Trump only cares about himself, the fact that he’s trying to illegitimately displace the legitimate president is a dead giveaway. But Kilmeade let the obvious lie go.
Kilmeade’s own network has declared Joe Biden the winner of the election and has debunked voter fraud claims. But Kilmeade gave them credence.
TRUMP: But what they did is, they cheated. They cheated like nobody's ever cheated before that we know of.
KILMEADE: Right.
[…]
TRUMP: [T]hey cheated like nobody's ever cheated before. And they got caught. Just like the spying on my campaign –
KILMEADE: Right.
TRUMP: -- -- campaign got caught. They cheated like nobody's cheated before. And they got caught. So nobody can go in and say oh, congratulations on running a good race. They didn't run a good race. They cheated. They dropped hundreds of thousands of ballots.
KILMEADE: Right.
Kilmeade made another half-hearted attempt at reality, but quickly backed off:
KILMEADE: But you -- but you guys have been unable to prove [voter fraud] as of now. If something happens --
TRUMP: Excuse me. Excuse me. We've proven it. But no judge has had the courage including the Supreme Court. I am so disappointed in them. No judge including the Supreme Court of the United States has had the courage to allow it to be heard. The Supreme Court, all they did was say we don't have standing. So they're saying essentially that the president of the United States and Texas and these other states, great states, they don't have standing.
They didn't go into the evidence. If you would look at the evidence, thousands of pages of evidence, we have over 1,000 affidavits --
KILMEADE: Right
You can watch Kilmeade’s disgraceful willingness to mislead his viewers below, from his December 12, 2020 un-masked and un-socially distanced interview, which aired on the December 13, 2020 Fox & Friends.
If the video is taken down, you can find the complete transcript on Factbase.
How will the hordes of collaborators, particularly those in the public eye, ever resurrect their dignity? They have turned a blind eye to, even egged on, a rampaging criminal laying waste to the country they have always claimed to love more than life itself. They have seen 300,000 souls perish (over 100 9/11s), knowing full well that if the US had only matched the world average response, the COVID toll would be something like 65,000.
I’m not quite old enough to remember what the French did to their Vichy ‘Government’ Nazi collaborators after liberation, but from all accounts, it was not pretty.