During a panel on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin blasted President Donald Trump for Tweeting out an unfounded conspiracy theory that the 2016 election was unfairly skewed against him: “In a day of whackadoodle claims, this is the most whackadoodle of all.”
Earlier in the day, Trump falsely claimed on Twitter that Google somehow manipulated between 2.6 and 16 million votes in favor of Hillary Clinton, based solely on Congressional testimony from a month ago by one psychologist about the impact of the search engine giant’s results. Data experts have fact-checked and debunked this claim and Clinton also mocked the phony, unscientific nature of the study.
Prompted to assess this false claim among several others made by Trump, Toobin pulled no punches.
“In a day of whackadoodle claims this is the most whackadoodle of all because there is not even any claim that Google manipulated votes,” Toobin pointed out. “They didn’t go in there and change votes. No one claims that except Donald Trump. The idea is that searches were ranked in certain ways that helped Democrats rather than Republicans. This, too, has been long discredited, but it’s all part of this incredible nervousness about his political standing. I was wrong about 2016. I don’t know if he’s going to win or lose in 2020. But today’s spate of craziness tells us he’s really worried about losing. That is the real message. Not any of the substance.”
Fellow panelist Sabrina Siddiqui also noted that Trump’s latest claim is not the first time he has tried to come with an excuse to cover up the fact that he lost the 2016 popular vote, and it comes amid a spate of polls showing him losing to several of prospective 2020 Democratic presidential nominees.
“It is no coincidence that he picked out this 2.6 million number from the range that was provided in this unsubstantiated conspiracy theory because that is close to the margin by when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote,” she noted. “We’ve seen him repeatedly lash out when he is anxious about his own political standing and this is coming at a time when he’s very concerned and amid reports of impossible economic downturn and that is the one area where he has actually received higher marks from the American public in terms of issues. So that is something that he has to be concerned about.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
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