DEAR REPUBLICANS: IF YOU WANT TRUMP TO GO AWAY, MAYBE YOU SHOULD STFU ABOUT TWITTER AND HUNTER BIDEN

Politico tells us today that the Republican Party is scheming to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2024 nomination. Big organizations such as the Club for Growth and the Koch network's Americans for Prosperity plan to spend money to defeat Trump. Donors are telling presidential aspirants that they shouldn't stay in the race if they're struggling to win primaries and are splitting the anti-Trump vote. A top GOP fundraiser says of Trump:

“He is a metastasizing cancer who if he is not stopped is going to destroy the party. Donald Trump is a loser. He is the first president since Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term. Because of him Chuck Schumer is the Leader Schumer, and the progressive agenda is threatening to take over the country. And he is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.”

But at the same time, House Republicans and Fox News are pushing the notion that, actually, Donald Trump is right when he says the 2020 election was rigged -- a message that reinforces Trump's case for being renominated.

Here's Congressman Pat Fallon, a member of the House Oversight Committee, on Fox this morning talking about Twitter's response to the New York Post's reports on the Hunter Biden laptop:

Fallon says:

They kept using a dodge by saying, "Well, we're trying to fight foreign interference in the election cycle" when, ironically, they were the ones that were interfering with the election cycle. I mean, the Hunter Biden laptop story and the evidence that was in there, the Media Research Center ran a poll and said 17 percent of Democrats -- of Democrats! -- in key swing states would have changed their vote. President Trump needed a hundred thousand people, a hundred-thousand-vote swing. That's a potential 3.2-million-person swing! And they-- Twitter changed and altered the 2020 election.

(As Philip Bump noted in December, the wording of that Media Research Center poll question was absurdly inflammatory: “At the time you cast your vote for president, were you aware that evidence exists, including bank transactions the FBI is currently investigating, that directly links Joe Biden and his family to a corrupt financial arrangement between a Chinese company with connections to the Chinese Communist Party that was secretly intended to provide the Biden family with tens of millions of dollars in profits?” So I don't trust the poll results.)

And here's Congressman Clay Higgins:

BREAKING: @RepClayHiggins warns former Twitter executives this is just the investigation part “later comes the arrest part, your attorneys are familiar with that.. I’d like to spend five hours with these ladies and gentlemen doing depositions surely yet to come”

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/FREASWOpgt

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 8, 2023

Here's a fuller version of the key quote, from a Fox News story:

"You, ladies and gentlemen, interfered with the United States of America 2020 presidential election, knowingly and willingly," Higgins said. "That’s the bad news, it’s gonna get worse because this is the investigation part. Later comes the arrest part. Your attorneys are familiar with that."

And here's Sean Hannity on Fox:

As a reminder, there was ample evidence of collusion in the 2020 election, but not between Trump and Russia. Instead, Twitter, Facebook, Google, other big tech companies were coordinating, collaborating with not only the DNC, the Biden campaign, but the upper echelon of your FBI all united In one effort, they wanted to defeat Donald J. Trump and help elect Joe Biden. Now, the first example of this involves a very true Hunter Biden laptop story from hell.... Twitter, other big tech, they eagerly censored The New York Post, America's oldest newspaper because of their blind rage against Donald Trump....

What Twitter did in the fall of 2020 for Joe Biden was the in-kind donation of in-kind donations so big that you could actually never measure the amount of dollars it would have cost somebody to buy that kind of information suppression. They censored a scandal that could have turned the entire election.

We all know that Rupert Murdoch wants Ron DeSantis to be the 2024 GOP nominee, not Donald Trump. But Fox News is promoting the message that the election was rigged. This the genteel version of the Big Lie -- it doesn't involve phony Chinese bamboo ballots or satellites beaming fake votes in from Italy. But this is essentially Trump's message, and Murdoch's flagship news operation is repeatedly promoting it.

And big GOP donors are presumably still giving money to Republicans who won't stop talking about 2020 and election rigging. If the donors are convinced that Trump is a sure loser, maybe they should turn off the money spigot.

But they won't, and Murdoch won't stop giving these attacks wall-to-wall coverage. Sucks for them that the result could be that they're stuck with Trump again.