Former President Donald Trump continued to desperately push conspiracy theories on a Monday night Fox News interview, falsely claiming that the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation into the hush money payment Trump made to Stormy Daniels is connected to the Big Lie and is an organized and politically motivated move to keep him out of office.
“It’s a new way of cheating in elections,” Trump said when Fox anchor Sean Hannity asked him about the hush money probe. “It’s called election interference.”
“If they can’t win at the ballot box, because I’m leading everybody by a lot in the polls, every Republican frankly and every Democrat by a lot… they can’t beat you that way they’re gonna do this kind of stuff.”
This comes after Trump took to his bootleg social media platform Truth Social on March 18 and announced that he expected to be arrested in three days. He turned out to be wrong but during the days leading up to an expected arrest he called on his supporters to protest the possible indictment and warned of “potential death and destruction.”
During the Fox interview, Trump denied that his all caps screed calling on his supporters to “TAKE OUR NATION BACK” was a call for violence.
“I didn’t say death and destruction,” Trump said. “I didn’t say, ‘do something bad about it.’ I said, ‘I’m afraid that people will do something.’ Cause people are very angry about it.”
The former president also claimed that his Truth Social post — which he later deleted — of an article featuring a split photo of him holding a baseball bat opposite Bragg was done unknowingly.
“When the story was put up…we didn’t see pictures. We put up a story that was very exculpatory, very good story from the standpoint of what we’re talking about,” he said.
Trump explained the picture of him holding a baseball bat was taken in the White House to promote a company that makes bats in America. He said the picture of Alvin Bragg was added next to it after the fact.
“I didn’t do it. They did it,” he added. “I guess the people that do the paper or somebody put pictures together.”
Trump also dodged a question about how he was handling the chance of arrest, talking instead about his recent rally in Waco, Texas — which he described as a “love fest” — and claiming that there are “people who are being dropped into our country” through the Southern border from mental institutions in South America. It is unclear what he is talking about there.
But this is not the first time Trump tried to come up with convoluted and desperate threads tying investigations into him to what he calls a political witch hunt.
Last week Trump also spread similar conspiracy theories, claiming that the Manhattan DA’s office is in cahoots with the Biden Justice Department to use the Stormy Daniels hush money investigation to eliminate a 2024 presidential candidate.
“We’re dealing with very dishonest people. We’re dealing with thugs,” Trump said of a possible indictment during his Fox interview. “We’re dealing with people I actually believe that hate our country.”
