Sen. Ron Johnson secretly recorded telling a constituent the truth about the Big Lie
Reporter and activist Laura Windsor has been doing a very good job of getting Republican operatives and elected officials to admit the truth on camera. She has used her The Under Current show to expose how cynical and counterproductive to democracy the GOP is at this point in time. On Tuesday, Windsor released some video of Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin admitting there was no election fraud going on in Wisconsin during the 2020 elections. This is quite the admission from one of the biggest promoters of Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election results came out of some kind of massive voter fraud campaign run by Democratic operatives.
At first, Windsor presents herself as someone who does not believe President Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Wisconsin. Johnson asks her if she even knows what the vote totals in Wisconsin were. She says she does not know what they were. Johnson then chastises her, saying she can’t even “state that opinion” if she doesn’t even have the basic information. Coming from Johnson, that’s pretty rich. Just consider the level of misinformation that Johnson has promoted to the nation in all aspects of the “Stop the Steal” election fraud and subsequent attempted coup d’etat on our government.
Johnson goes on to explain that a recount was done; according to him, the recount showed that Republicans did very well Wisconsin. In fact, Johnson says the GOP did better than they ever have in Wisconsin, and that even though Trump did better than previous GOP candidates, he didn’t do well enough to overcome Biden. This kind of Election Day reality, of course, has been a real tough hurdle for the conspiracy theorists to jump. And then, bringing his voice down—because Ron Johnson is nothing if not a coward and a snake-oil salesman—Johnson gives up the ghost: “The only reason Donald Trump lost Wisconsin is that 51,000 Republican voters didn’t vote for him. They voted for Republican candidates.”
Windsor says with feigned disbelief that she can’t imagine Biden won “fair and square,” to which Johnson replies, “Well, look at the totals. it’s certainly plausible there’s nothing obviously skewed about the results.” And then, very matter-of-factly, he adds, “There isn’t.” Now that’s a fact. Johnson goes on to prove that while he seems like an incompetent person, he can still do simple math, explaining that if Trump had gotten all of the votes that went to Republicans in House races in Wisconsin, “he would have won.” Trump received about 1.61 million votes in the Cheese State. Republican House members received a total of about 1.659 million votes. Trump lost by about 20,000 votes to President Joe Biden.
So the Big Lie is … a … big lie? You don’t say, Ron.
This is an interesting admission from Johnson since facts have never gotten in the way of Johnson’s ability to lie to the American public about our national security, especially for his own political gain. He has also enjoyed playing a very racist game of promoting the concept that MAGA-types being unhappy about losing an election and trying to overthrow the democratic process is fine and legal as long as they’re mostly white. More recently, Ron has been out and about promoting terrible pandemic science, the kind of anti-vaxxer and anti-public health information that would lead one to believe Johnson had figured out a way to escape the laws of physics and scrape beneath the bottom of a barrel.