Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto corrected Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election on Friday, cutting away from the former president’s campaign rally to remind viewers that the issue is settled after having been “adjudicated many, many times.”
Trump, on the eve of the GOP primary in South Carolina, repeated his debunked assertion about the election he lost, claiming the vote had somehow been rigged.
Cavuto did not cut away from Trump’s speech immediately, and when he did so, it was a few minutes before a change in programming at the top of the hour. Still, the longtime Fox anchor—who has faced the ire of Trump and some of his supporters for years—pushed back, and not only about Trump’s election-related comments.
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“We’re continuing the monitoring of the president’s remarks, and I mean no offense to him if some of you might want to continue hearing,” the Your World anchor began. “But I did have to say that even though the former president is entitled to his opinions, he’s not entitled to his own set of facts.”
Cavuto first addressed how Trump argued that the stock market is “doing well because the polls show we’re winning by a lot.”
“The market has indeed been going up, it having nothing to do with him and everything to do with this aggressive cut in interest rates—or there’s a hiking in interest rates that stabilized inflation,” Cavuto said.
“And of course, the whole artificial intelligence phenomenon that has benefited Nvidia and a host of companies that are making money hand over fist—so that, whether you want to give Biden credit for that, [it] has nothing to do with Donald Trump,” he added.
As for Trump’s Big Lie, Cavuto’s response was similar to when he read fan mail from election deniers on his mid-afternoon show late last year.
“[Trump] went on to talk about the 2020 election and how that was rigged. This has been adjudicated many, many times—dozens of times. It’s been investigated by everyone and his uncle, no fewer than 44 investigations launched, some of them by judges that were picked by Donald Trump himself, that found no evidence of that in the seven battleground states where most of them were focused,” Cavuto said.
“Donald Trump lost each and every one of those states, and no facts—or no history that he mentions on the stump right now—will change that.”
On Newsmax, meanwhile, Trump’s obsession with the 2020 election was met with a brief disclaimer.
After Trump had concluded his remarks, host Carl Higbie read out loud from a piece of paper in front of him: “The president mentioned in his speech the 2020 elections. Newsmax as a network believes the results were legal and final.”
Last August, Newsmax aired a similar boilerplate statement acknowledging the “legal and final” outcome after host Eric Bolling interviewed Trump.
The conservative-friendly network is facing defamation lawsuits from Dominion and Smartmatic, two voting software companies, over the airing of false claims that the companies were somehow involved in “rigging” the 2020 election against Trump.
Fox News agreed to a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion last April.
