Megyn’s interview with Bill Maher earlier this week made headlines for their fiery back and forth on topics like the ‘lawfare’ against Donald Trump, Biden family corruption, and the left-wing talking point about ‘threats to democracy.’
As it relates to the latter, Maher said one of the reasons he could never support Trump is because he contests the results of the 2020 election. When Megyn pointed out that Hillary Clinton has used similar language to Trump to describe her 2016 loss, Maher was incredulous.
But, as many recall, there are receipts and Megyn has them. On Wednesday’s show, she was joined by National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke and Rich Lowry to discuss Clinton’s election denialism post-2016 and what Democrats don’t understand about the U.S. electorate.
The Receipts
As Megyn shared, she was expecting to disagree with Maher during their sit down, but she did notice a shift in his demeanor at one particular moment. “As soon as he asked me he asked me explicitly whether I was going to vote for Trump… [and] I said I’m going to vote for Donald Trump… you can see the shift,” she said. “He looked angry, and he actually stopped looking me in the eye.”
That question led into a now-viral exchange about election denialism because Megyn brought up the fact that Clinton did not accept the results of the 2016 election.
MEGYN: Hillary Clinton, of course, is the original election denier. I’m sure you voted for her and ’16–
MAHER: Well, she’s not an election denier.
MEGYN: She absolutely was the OG election denier.
MAHER: First of all, she came out before the sun had risen to concede the election to Trump.
MEGYN: And then spent the next four years saying he was ‘illegitimate.’ He was an ‘illegitimate president.’
MAHER: Okay. Well, first of all, saying– she didn’t say he was illegitimate.
MEGYN: Yes, she did.
MAHER: You tell me exactly what she said.
MEGYN: She said those exact words repeatedly.
MAHER: Okay. I mean, she conceded the election. Whether, whether you’re interpreting her disappointment at losing it as the same thing as Trump not conceding it, I don’t know if that’s where you’re getting it from. But again, it’s a tremendous false equivalency. You could ask Hillary Clinton right now, ‘Who won that election?’ She will tell you, ‘Donald Trump won the election.’
MEGYN: Now she knows she has to because of what Trump has done.
MAHER: She came out that night in her dark purple suit and conceded the election.
MEGYN: Correct. She conceded the election and then spent the next four years trying to convince us it was not legitimate.
While Megyn pushed back in the moment with the “illegitimate president” language that Clinton regularly used, she also had her team put together a little montage in which the former secretary of state cast doubt on the outcome. A few highlights:
“I do think that he knows that he is an illegitimate president.”
– Clinton to The View, October 2019
“I believe he knows he’s an illegitimate president. He knows. He knows that there were a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out the way it did.”
– Clinton to CBS News, September 2019
“As I’ve been telling candidates who have come to see me, you can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.”
– Clinton at a Los Angeles event, May 2019
“Joe and Kamala can win by 3 million votes and still lose. Take it from me. So, we need numbers overwhelming, so Trump can’t sneak or steal his way to victory.”
– Clinton to the DNC, August 2020
Maher was certainly not living under a rock during that period, which led Megyn to theorize what may be driving his selective memory. “So, why can’t a smart guy like Maher know that,” she asked. “I mean, he genuinely seemed surprised to hear this from me… and I think it’s just his true hatred for Trump.”
What the Left Doesn’t Get
While Lowry was willing to guess that the left is ignorant to the language from Clinton and others because they weren’t covering it, he said there is one aspect they can’t deny. “They did not accept the legitimacy of the 2016 election and this caused the whole Russian collusion hoax and all the rest of it,” he said. “And people are still saying things like that today.”
Megyn noted that Clinton “is the reason we had” so-called Russia Gate to begin with. “She sabotaged Trump’s entire first term with these allegations that he stole it with the help of the Russians,” she explained. “She hired Fusion GPS. She had her lawyers down there pretending that there were some magic computers at Trump Tower that were communicating with the Russians.”
All of that, Megyn added, is “tied to Hillary,” yet gets overlooked. “It’s fine because she said the words ‘he won,'” she asked. “No, she is the OG denier.”
As someone who does not plan to vote for president this November because of the candidate selection, Cooke said he was “well placed” to point out that “the left has a massive liability and is totally incapable of seeing itself as guilty of many of the same crimes” they accuse Trump and the right of.
“They think, ‘Well, that’s not the same because Trump is bad, therefore, whatever it takes to get rid of him is legitimate.’ But you know who doesn’t think that? Americans,” Cooke concluded. “They think what Trump did was appalling, as do I, and they also think that trying to bend the system to get rid of him is appalling. The Democrats can’t internalize it.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Cooke and Lowry by tuning in to episode 798 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.