Facts, and fact-checkers, are the enemy of politicians such as Trump, who depend on lies for their legitimacy.
Who would Trump be if he admitted he lost the 2020 election? By democratic standards, he would be just another president who failed to convince the electorate that he was the best choice given his record. But Trump is an authoritarian: defeat is associated with weakness, and leaves him vulnerable to prosecution.
So Trump and his numerous high-level co-conspirators applied themselves assiduously to what would become one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history: convincing tens of millions of Americans that he and not Joe Biden had won the election. He did this while operating in an open society with a pluralistic media environment, which makes this an unprecedented feat of indoctrination.
Of course, Trump could never have succeeded without his most influential partner, Fox “News.”
A memo that formed part of the lawsuit’s documentation showed that Rupert Murdoch floated the idea that Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and other top hosts trusted by the Fox audience should appear together on television in Nov. 2020 and state clearly that Biden had won the election. Murdoch wrote that presenting a united front “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election [was] stolen.”
Instead, Murdoch & Company went in the opposite direction to preserve audience size and profit margins. That decision had calamitous consequences, legitimating the lie that gave rise to the “Stop the Steal” movement that provided momentum and emotional heat for the insurrection.
For the strongman, facts are formidable adversaries, and fact-checkers are enemies out to burst his bubble of illusions and lies. That is why the prospect of being fact-checked is enough to make an authoritarian politician such as Trump withdraw from an interview.