Trump appeared to be referencing an April interview Carlson conducted with Justin Haskins, a think-tanker at the right-wing Heartland Institute, as Mediaite noted. 

Carlson introduced Haskins by falsely claiming that Trump faced federal criminal prosecution simply because he suggested “the 2020 presidential campaign was not on the level,” asserting that “it’s worth denying the legitimacy of that election,” and alleging that a poll Heartland conducted demonstrated that widespread voter fraud did take place. 

Haskins went on to detail the poll, in which respondents who said they voted absentee or with mail-in ballots in the 2020 election were asked if they engaged in various illegal actions, like voting in a state in which they were not a legal resident or forging the signature of someone else on their ballot. 

“All told, it’s at least — and I say at least — 1 in 5 mail-in ballots involved some kind of fraudulent activity,” he concluded.

About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll. pic.twitter.com/fxHL9hT4sw

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 26, 2024

But Heartland’s poll “instantly fails the smell test,” Washington Post reporter Philip Bump wrote in December, when Trump previously cited the results. Bump pointed  out that the poll would indicate both a massive quantity of fraud happening undetected — and that Republicans were conducting that fraud at the same rate as Democrats. From the post:

A fifth of voters said they voted in a state where they no longer live? About 6 in 10 Americans have never moved out of the states in which they were born. Half of the rest, we are meant to believe, committed an obvious form of election fraud three years ago.

Without, I’ll add, being detected by any authority or by any of the thousands of people who, eager to prove Trump right, have been looking for examples of fraudulent voting. Those professional and amateur sleuths have also somehow not found evidence showing that 1 in 12 absentee voters — millions of people! — were offered cash for their votes. This would seem like it might leave a trail.

Rasmussen did provide a breakdown of the responses by demographic group, which does not exactly help Trump’s argument that the election was being stolen from him. After all, a quarter of the Republicans they interviewed said they also voted by absentee ballot, and their admissions of these federal crimes matched the rates of admission by Democrats.

While Trump in his Truth Social post described Haskins as an “election expert,” Haskins’ Heartland bio gives no indication of any actual expertise in that field. It identifies him as the director of its “Socialism Research Center,” and “the editor-in-chief of StoppingSocialism.com, one of the world’s largest and most influential publications devoted to challenging socialism,” and highlights his publication by various right-wing news outlets and his work co-authoring surveys.

Trump is immersed in a right-wing media bubble that confirms his biases and stokes his worst inclinations. He often took action or spoke out during his presidency in response to what he was seeing from favorite outlets like Fox News, a pattern which very much applied to his seditious plot to delegitimize and subvert the 2020 election. 

That plan depended on deluging the Republican base with a constant stream of nonsensical claims of election fraud in order to put pressure on its elected officials to act on Trump’s behalf — and right-wing media were more than willing to play their part to achieve those ends.

Trump began regularly promoting Fox reports about the election fraud in the months leading up to the vote. 

After he falsely declared victory on the night of Election Day — even as his top campaign and administration aides reportedly told him he had lost — he relied instead on the deranged lies his favored Fox hosts were telling him. (Fox’s coverage ultimately resulted in a record $787.5 million defamation settlement with the election technology company Dominion Voting Systems). 

Over the following weeks, Trump also began promoting even more baroque fever dreams from Fox’s fringe-right competitors Newsmax and One America News Network. 

Ultimately, Trump sent at least 76 tweets in response to right-wing TV programming about purported fraud in the 2020 election in the weeks between Election Day and the eventual result of his incitement: the January 6, 2021, riot in which his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. 

Trump’s Sunday social media post demonstrates that the pipeline that brought election fraud lies to the former president in 2020 is still online as the 2024 election approaches. But the right-wing ecosystem is more fractured and competitive than it was, as former Foxers like Carlson have left the network and attracted their own audiences. Given this ecosystem, we are likely to see the varied outlets and personalities — competing for Trump’s attention and favor — push each other to endorse ever-less-credible claims to support the GOP nominee’s contention that he can lose only if the election is stolen.  

With the 2024 election shaping up to be a close one, the Republican Party and its propagandists turning election denial into a core value, and the right-wing ecosystem primed to rerun the demagoguery that helped bring about an insurrection, the next few months are looking grim.