Trump tells rally-goers he’s writing ‘The Crime of the Century’ book about election he tried to steal

Former US president Donald Trump told thousands of rally-goers over the weekend in Texas that he’s penning a book about the so-called “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and that he intends to call the book, The Crime of the Century.

Speaking at the Austin Convention Center on Saturday, the former US leader criticised Democrats for a litany of issues at an event that was part of the larger American Freedom Tour, which is a conservative circuit that aims to rally support for Mr Trump ahead of the 2022 presidential election.

“This is the greatest hoax, heist. This is one of the greatest crimes in the history of our country. And sadly there prosecutors don’t want to do anything about it,” Mr Trump said, while continuing to peddle his baseless claims that his 2020 bid for re-election against US President Joe Biden was unfairly stolen from him because of voter fraud.

“This is the crime of the century. I’m actually writing a book about it called The Crime of the Century,” Mr Trump said.

The book, he conceded, might not be everyone’s cup of tea since he said the content it discusses – his unproven claim that the election was stolen – could make people “depressed”.

“I don’t think you’ll enjoy it. You’ll be very depressed when you read it, but we want to have it down for historic reasons,” he said.

The GOP kingmaker also turned his attention to other hot-button issues within the Republican Party at the Austin event, including public education and Florida’s parental rights bill, border security and critical race theory.

Teachers, he said, shouldn’t be permitted to “teach transgender”, while along the border, he admonished the Biden administration for “systematically surrendering every single advantage that I really brilliantly got”.

Trump has written more than a dozen books over his career, with most of the content involving discussions around his work in real estate, business and self-help styled musings on how to get rich.

Recently, a coffee table picture book of the former president’s that documented his time in office reportedly began pulling in millions of dollars in sales.

Our Journey Together, which contains photographs of Mr Trump alongside captions that the reader is to assume were written by the former commander-in-chief himself, was retailing for $75, or, if readers wanted a signed copy, for up to $230.

The Saturday night speech where Mr Trump spoke for over an hour capped off an all-day event that also played host to several leading voices from within the Republican party’s right-leaning figures, including Donald Trump Jr and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Mr Trump’s false claims of mass voter fraud have been widely debunked by multiple US courts, federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, and has even been dismissed by a vast pool of data and research which clearly shows the safeguards that are in place to protect mail-in voting – a frequent site of scorn from the former US president – and proves that it’s safe from fraud and cheating.