Never Trumper Jonah Goldberg: Trump ‘Is Trying to Steal’ the Election

Never Trump stalwart Jonah Goldberg published an essay Friday in which he argued that President Donald Trump “is trying to steal an election he clearly and unequivocally lost.”

Goldberg also claimed on Twitter that Trump’s fight to contest the election results proved that he and other critics of the president were right “all along” about his character.

In his essay, Goldberg argued:

The president of the United States is trying to steal an election he clearly and unequivocally lost.

Even liberals frame this fact wrong. They keep saying that Trump is undermining the legitimacy of the election. He is certainly doing that. But the undermining isn’t the endhe most desires—it’s the means to that end. The man is literally trying to steal an election.

…

It’s pretty clear now—as I think Nicholas Grossman pretty accurately predicted—that his goal was always to steal the election if he didn’t win fairly.* He was pretty transparent about this long before the election. He spent months saying that mail-in or early ballots were rife with fraud. He told all of his voters to vote on Election Day. He expected this would give him a “mirage” lead that night, and then, because he had already established the illegitimacy of mail-in ballots, he could pretend to be justified in proclaiming victory on Election Night.

Goldberg once popularized the idea that contemporary liberalism, as practiced by the Democratic Party, is rooted in fascism. He opposed Trump’s nomination as the Republican candidate in 2016, however, and has been a staunch critic of Trump ever since. He launched the “Trump-skeptical” website The Dispatch in 2019.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.