{"id":359224,"date":"2026-06-13T12:01:25","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T12:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/359224\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T12:01:25","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T12:01:25","slug":"the-facts-didnt-fit-trumps-california-conspiracy-theory-so-he-adjusted-the-conspiracy-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/359224\/","title":{"rendered":"The facts didn\u2019t fit Trump\u2019s California conspiracy theory. So he adjusted the conspiracy theory"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re pushing<\/a> the baseless conspiracy theory that the results of last week\u2019s California primary elections<\/a> were rigged against Republicans like gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, it would seem highly inconvenient that Hilton has succeeded<\/a> in qualifying for the November runoffs.<\/p>\n

But if you\u2019re a seasoned<\/a> conspiracy<\/a> theorist<\/a>, as President Donald Trump is, you don\u2019t just stop telling a fantastical tale when it is contradicted by new facts. Rather, you simply adjust the conspiracy theory so that the new facts now fit within it.<\/p>\n

Trump has years of experience with this kind of dishonest narrative flexibility. It\u2019s what he employed, for example, after former President Barack Obama released<\/a> his long-form Hawaii birth certificate in 2011, conclusively disproving Trump\u2019s conspiracy theory that Obama wasn\u2019t actually born in the US. Rather than immediately abandon his nonsense, Trump soon began suggesting<\/a> the birth certificate was a phony.<\/p>\n

This time, rather than conceding that it\u2019s obviously time to abandon his \u201crigged election<\/a>\u201d declarations about California, Trump has begun claiming that he had jawboned the riggers into submission \u2026 but only in Hilton\u2019s case, not the case of unsuccessful Republican Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt.<\/p>\n

Try to follow along here.<\/p>\n

Hilton hasn\u2019t endorsed Trump\u2019s fraud claims; he has said<\/a> he has \u201cseen nothing\u201d to justify any legal intervention. But Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that Hilton\u2019s qualification for the runoff, as projected by CNN<\/a> and others, happened because Trump had publicly warned that Democrats were about to rig the results to prevent Hilton from qualifying for the runoff. It was because of this Trump \u201cheat,\u201d Trump said, that unnamed Democrats felt compelled to surrender their plan to cheat Hilton like they, according to Trump, cheated Pratt.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s story<\/a>: \u201cAnd then I hit them hard on that (Pratt\u2019s defeat), but I started talking about Steve Hilton, who\u2019s a fantastic guy. And I saw them say it was going to be two weeks before they knew, and I started hitting them. \u2018It\u2019s going to happen to Steve Hilton, too.\u2019 It\u2019s \u2013 \u2018Watch, you gotta watch\u2019 \u2013 and they approved Steve Hilton very quickly. They didn\u2019t want, there was too much heat on them. The only reason he got approved \u2013 he had all the votes he needed, probably to be first place \u2013 but the only reason they approved Steve Hilton, it was going to be two weeks, they said, and then they approved him that night. Because the heat was on them, because they\u2019re cheatin\u2019 dogs.\u201d<\/p>\n

He repeated<\/a> the story Thursday morning on Fox News, saying that a rigged defeat \u201cwas happening to Steve Hilton\u201d but then \u201cI went on such a tear that they approved it immediately; they approved Steve. It\u2019s such a rigged deal, it\u2019s so crazy. They were, they approved him so fast because everybody was watching.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is, of course, complete hogwash.<\/p>\n

All that has happened in California, as far as all available evidence shows, is that counties are counting votes \u2013 slowly<\/a>, as usual, but legitimately. In the case of the Los Angeles mayoral primary, counting votes has meant that it has become clear that Pratt will not achieve the top-two finish<\/a> needed to qualify for the runoff. In the case of the state primary for governor, counting votes has meant that it has become clear that Hilton will achieve a top-two finish<\/a>.<\/p>\n

No California authority \u201capproved him,\u201d whether because of Trump or because of anybody else; there was no behind-the-scenes decision to grant Hilton his wish. The reality is boring: California voters voted; counties counted; media outlets eventually projected, unofficially, that Hilton would earn enough votes to advance in a state in which about 45%<\/a> of registered voters were Democratic and about 25% were Republican; separately, media outlets unofficially projected that Pratt wouldn\u2019t earn enough votes to advance in a city in which Democrats outnumbered Republicans much more significantly, about 55% to 15%.<\/p>\n

The end. Except, as usual with Trump, not the end.<\/p>\n

A mountainous supply of evidence, over the course of more than five years, has never been sufficient to get Trump to drop his conspiratorial lying about the 2020 presidential election he lost. It\u2019s no surprise that one very strong piece of contradicting evidence hasn\u2019t been sufficient to get him to dump this new round of foolishness.<\/p>\n

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019re pushing the baseless conspiracy theory that the results of last week\u2019s California primary elections were rigged…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359225,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,81244,536,5401,43125,17382,2805],"class_list":["post-359224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-conspiracy-theory","tag-donald-trump","tag-president-barack-obama","tag-spencer-pratt","tag-steve-hilton","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}