Tim Scott struggles to explain Trump’s voter fraud lies

US Senator Tim Scott found himself in a familiar spot on Sunday: dodging questions about the conduct and statements of Donald Trump as he tried to provide the policy-based counter to Democrats that the Republican frontrunner refuses to do.

Scott was on CNN’s State of the Union, where he was interviewed by Dana Bash as the final weekend of the 2024 presidential campaign played out across America. Trump and Harris are completing last-minute swing state blitzes as polls show the race very close.

The South Carolina lawmaker pushed back on questions about recent statements from Trump and RFK Jr and offered a response about “misinformation” regarding election fraud that earned a derisive remark from Bash. He refused to directly engage with Bash’s question — whether it was right for the Trump campaign to be spreading misinformation about supposed voter fraud in Pennsylvania — and instead accused the “liberal media” of being the ones spreading misinformation.

Scott refused to offer any examples that would back that claim up; notably, the only media outlets that were credibly accused of making false statements about the 2020 election cycle were both conservative stations, Newsmax and Fox News.

Both settled lawsuits filed against them by voting software companies over those false claims, with Fox in particular paying out nearly $800m. Rupert Murdoch said his company’s anchors said things on television about the 2020 election they knew to be untrue, and that assertion was backed up by text messages and other communications obtained as part of the legal process in that lawsuit.

Scott would go on to lie and say that CNN had not covered the assassination attempts against Donald Trump; one in Butler, Pennsylvania, and one in Florida. An exasperated Bash pointed out that this was untrue and that the network had provided “wall-to-wall coverage” of both incidents.

The South Carolina senator was an unsuccessful contender for Donald Trump’s running mate earlier this year, after publicly declaring onstage that he “loved” the former president who was forcing him, at the time, to bad-mouth Nikki Haley — Trump’s rival in the Republican primary.

Haley was the governor who appointed Scott to the US Senate, although he refused to endorse her against Trump in the Republican primary.

In 2020, the former president’s lies about voter fraud and widespread election shenanigans led to a failed months-long bid to turn around his defeat in courts across the country.

After exhausting those options, Trump’s supporters engaged in a deadly riot at the US Capitol aimed at halting the certification of the election. The ex-president and his team had encouraged the crowds to descend upon DC that day, even though they were warned that the likelihood of violence was high.

The ex-president, meanwhile, is charging into Election Day faced with a slew of new polling showing the campaign possibly turning in Kamala Harris’s favor in the final days.

A new Iowa poll from J. Ann Selzer, long considered the gold standard of Iowa polling, was released on Saturday and showed the ex-president’s support collapsing there; other surveys have suggested that the race is now tied or very close in North Carolina as well.

Harris appeared Saturday evening on Saturday Night Live and will continue her tour of every major battleground state ahead of Tuesday.