Axios is attempting to manufacture a narrative in which Donald Trump has become more disciplined, substituting “vague insinuations” that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” against him for the explicit false claims of a “stolen” election that have marked the former president’s rhetoric since November 2020. The piece falls flat for a number of reasons, including that Trump used the explicit “rigged” rhetoric in several of the speeches Axios cited.

Trump tried to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election. His slew of lies and conspiracy theories about widespread fraud failed to sway the courts, but riled his supporters to the point that a mob he summoned to Washington, D.C., stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to prevent the transition of power. His continued insistence that the election had been rigged against him and that he was right to try to remain in power poses a threat to American democracy.

Trump’s incendiary rhetoric also poses a threat to his 2024 campaign — the majority of Americans recognize that President Joe Biden was the legitimate victor in 2020, and exit polls reveal Trump’s weakness in GOP primaries with the minority of the party that agrees. Ideally, from the standpoint of Trump’s campaign staff, their candidate would stop saying that he actually won the 2020 election. Failing that, it would be helpful if they could somehow convince reporters to claim that he had stopped. But who could possibly be that credulous?

Axios filled that void on Monday morning with a story pointing to “some early success” for Trump advisers who are trying to get their candidate to “focus … less on old grievances and personal drama.” As evidence of that thesis, the publication claimed: “In some recent speeches, Trump has avoided his typical complaint that the 2020 election he lost was ‘stolen’ — and instead has said, ‘We were interrupted,’ or ‘something very bad happened.’” 

Every attendee at a Trump rally — and Axios’ journalists —- know what Trump means when he says “something very bad happened” during the vote count. For Axios to give Trump credit for increased discipline on the grounds that he is substituting vague, false insinuations of a stolen election for explicit, false claims of a stolen election is a sign that the bar it has set for Trump is absurdly low.

But Trump still hasn’t actually cleared that bar.

The Axios piece lists six examples of Trump using the alternative rhetoric in speeches since late January — but at least three of those speeches also included the “typical complaint” of a stolen election Axios claimed he had avoided.

Axios cited a January 22 speech in New Hampshire, in which Trump said of his domestic policy goals, “We almost had it done until we were interrupted.” 

• But in the same speech, he described the 2020 election as “rigged” at least seven times, including saying, “It was a rigged election. And for challenging [the] election, they indict you.”

The piece pointed to a January 29 speech in Nevada, in which Trump claimed that “We did much better in 2020 ... but something happened.”

• In the same speech, he repeatedly claimed the election was “rigged,” including saying that “we actually caught it and it was rigged and it was stolen.”

A third case is Trump’s statement at a February 12 rally in South Carolina, “A bad thing happened. Bad things.”

• In the same speech, he said: “The radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we're not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.”

Additionally, Axios cited as a fourth example Trump saying at a border event on Thursday, “We did much better in 2020 than we ever even thought about doing in 2016 ... (but) very bad things happened.”

• While Axios used this to show that Trump had pulled back on his explicit language of a “rigged” election, Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto responded by saying, “He still lost that election. That is not in doubt anymore."

Axios included a “reality check” note that Trump had used “rigged” language in his February speech at CPAC — but such language has remained a staple of his speeches throughout the period the publication examined. 

Indeed, at a rally on Saturday, Trump said: “Did you ever notice they go after the people that want to find out where the cheating was — and, by the way, 82% of the country understands that it was a rigged election, OK? You can’t have a country with that.” 

The week before, he gave a speech so replete with 2020 election lies that the lawsuit-averse Newsmax felt it was necessary to have its host follow Trump’s remarks by reading the following disclaimer: “The [former] president mentioned in his speech the 2020 elections. Newsmax as a network believes the results were legal and final.” 

Reporters have spent the last eight years telling their audiences that a Trump “pivot” was around the corner. That they’ve been wrong every single time before does not seem to keep these pieces from getting written on the thinnest possible grounds.

Update (3/5/24): At a Monday night rally, Trump falsely claimed that the 2020 election was “rigged,” citing as evidence that he had been told that no one could lose with the 63 million vote total he amassed.