Photo: The Hill
The politics morning show “Rising,” produced by The Hill and which I currently co-host, was suspended by YouTube on Thursday for allegedly violating the platform’s rules around election misinformation. Two infractions were cited: First, the outlet posted the full video of former President Donald Trump’s recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on its page. The speech, of course, was chock full of craziness. Second, “Rising” played a minutelong clip of Trump’s commentary on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which included the claim that none of it would have happened if not for a “rigged election.”
“As an American, I’m angry about it and I’m saddened by it, and it all happened because of a rigged election. This would have never happened,” Trump says in the clip, which you can watch here.
The crime, we learned, that got the show suspended for seven days from its platform was that neither I nor my co-host, Robby Soave, paused to solemnly inform our viewers that Trump’s phrase — “a rigged election” — referred to his ongoing claim that the election was stolen from him in 2020 and that this claim is false.
We did scrutinize Trump’s claims. Along with a guest, The Federalist’s Emily Jashinsky, we discussed a theory floated by my Intercept colleague Murtaza Hussain that Trump is such a “madman” of such “aggressive unpredictability” that perhaps that instability did have some deterrent effect.
It seems plausible that Russia decided to make its...
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