On Monday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) refused to say that Joe Biden was legitimately elected president of the United States in 2020.
In a heated interview on ABC’s The View, he stated Biden “is the president” before raising false allegations of voting fraud, a common strategy adopted by Republicans confronted with questions about the 2020 elections.
“Biden is the president today,” Cruz said. “There are a lot of folks in the media that try to, anytime a Republican is in front of a TV camera, try to say the election was fair and square and legitimate. You know who y’all don’t do that to? You don’t do it to Hillary Clinton.”
In 2016, Clinton and other prominent Democrats claimed that she lost that year’s presidential election due to voting restriction laws passed by some states and Russian interference in the campaign, which was later confirmed by a U.S. Department of Justice investigation. She did not all the election illegitimate.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump and his allies falsely alleged fraud in the process of counting votes, specially absentee ballots, which was extensively debunked by investigations since then.
Cruz argued that the media has a double standard.
“So it’s illegitimate when Republicans win but not when Democrats win?” he asked.
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg noted that disputes made by Democrats didn’t result in violence, referring to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol incited by Trump to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.
“We may not like when Republicans win, but we don’t go and we don’t storm,” she said.
The interview was interrupted by a group of protesters demanding that ABC increase the network’s coverage of climate change. The group argued that the topic was not getting enough attention and was instead giving airtime to a climate change denier.
