Trump Makes Most Revealing Slip Yet About the Big Lie in New Audio

New audio from Variety co–editor in chief Ramin Setoodeh’s interview with Donald Trump confirms what the American public has known all along: The former president knows he lost the 2020 election.

During one of his six interviews with Trump for his book Apprentice in Wonderland, about Trump’s time on his reality show The Apprentice, Setoodah inquired about Trump’s relationship with former Fox News host Geraldo Rivera, who was a contestant on season 7 of the show. “And are you guys still close, or you no longer … ?” asked Setoodeh.

“No, I don’t think so. He is, uh, after I lost the election,” Trump began. Catching himself revealing that he never believed his own claims of a rigged election, he quickly revised his answer.

“I won the election, but when they said we lost, he called me three or four times,” he continued.

This is not the first time the veil has been pulled back on what was clearly a cynical attempt by Trump to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after his legitimate loss in the 2020 election. Former Attorney General William Barr alleged in 2023 that Trump “knew well he lost the election,” and former chief of staff Mark Meadows, as well as aides Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah Griffin, made similar claims when testifying before the House January 6 select committee.  

As CNN anchor Jim Acosta pointed out, however, Trump has never before admitted that he lost out loud, maintaining—even as lawsuit after lawsuit has ruled out the possibility of voter fraud or voting machine malfunctions—that he defeated Joe Biden.

The slip is more than just embarrassing for the 2024 presumptive Republican nominee, who continues to stoke the flames of electoral conspiracy among his supporters, four years after they stormed the Capitol. Trump’s claim may have legal consequences. 

Special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump alleges that he employed “knowingly false” claims of election fraud in his attempt to overturn the results of the election. That Trump would so quickly walk back a comment made during an interview for a book about his prepresidential reality TV show suggests that he’s aware of the tightrope he’s walking. 

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a federal law prohibiting domestic abusers under restraining orders from carrying firearms, with one lone dissenter: Justice Clarence Thomas.

In his dissenting opinion in United States v. Rahimi, Thomas sided with gun rights advocates who opposed the rule, arguing that the other Supreme Court justices had somehow misunderstood a three-year-old opinion he’d written about gun regulation. In this case, however, Thomas only has himself to blame.

In 2021, Thomas wrote the majority opinion in the case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a decision that kneecapped New York’s ban on publicly carrying firearms, by establishing a confusing new rule for determining whether gun laws violate the Second Amendment. Spoiler alert: Under the new rule, a lot of gun regulations would, which is precisely how Rahimi came to the Supreme Court in the first place.

According to Thomas’s opinion, regulation on a firearm must be “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” an impossibly vague guideline that has sparked chaos in the lower courts. But it was par for the course for the staunch originalist, who consistently leans on eighteenth-century doctrine.

While the majority opinions found that the law barring domestic abusers from possessing firearms was consistent with this test, Thomas was obviously not convinced.

“The Court and Government do not point to a single historical law revoking a citizen’s Second Amendment right based on possible interpersonal violence,” Thomas wrote. “Yet, in the interest of ensuring the Government can regulate one subset of society, today’s decision puts at risk the Second Amendment rights of many more.”

Thomas regularly points to historical tradition when trying to strip away people’s rights: He cited this reason when overturning the nationwide right to abortion and hinted he might do the same for same-sex marriage. And now, apparently, it also applies to safety in a person’s own relationship.

Thomas argued that criminal prosecution is a good enough means of keeping guns out of the hands of those who would do harm, insisting that the government could not “strip the Second Amendment right of anyone subject to a protective order—even if he has never been accused or convicted of a crime.”

Unfortunately for Thomas, his opinion in Bruen invites courts to look for historical analogues to rules befitting modern American society—but doesn’t determine in what way that analogue needs to be similar.

In the majority opinion, Chief Supreme Court Justice Roberts found that the law did satisfy Bruen’s requirement. “Our tradition of firearm regulation allows the government to disarm individuals who present a credible threat to the physical safety of others,” Roberts wrote.

As a result of Friday’s decision in Rahimi, many lower courts may see challenges to their rulings under Bruen, as they are forced to reconsider the application of Thomas’s originalist rule.

Steve Bannon desperately wants to stay out of prison—and now he’s making a last-ditch effort to the Supreme Court.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday night denied Bannon’s latest request to delay his prison sentence, which is set to begin July 1. Now the former Trump aide and MAGA king is appealing to the Supreme Court to save him.

Barring a Supreme Court intervention, Bannon will head to prison for four months for defying a subpoena from the House January 6 committee investigating the Capitol riot in 2021. The Justice Department took the matter to federal court, leading to Bannon’s 2022 trial and conviction. The former Breitbart editor and Trump adviser fought tooth and nail, from trying to turn the trial into a circus to attempting to delay his prison sentence with last-ditch appeals, including this latest effort.

In the likely event that Bannon goes to prison, it won’t be to a minimum-security prison camp, thanks to the fact that he’s also facing charges in New York over a border wall fraud case. Instead, he’d serve time at a low-security prison, possibly Rikers Island. He’s expected to stand trial for the fraud case in September, a second attempt at holding him accountable after Trump pardoned his federal charges.

None of this appears to have humbled Bannon. He has attempted to interfere in Brazil’s politics, in addition to the upcoming election in this country, and his radio show continues to serve as a haven for far-right Republicans to rant about whatever they want. He also told a crowd at the Turning Point Action convention last Saturday about all of the people in the Justice Department that Trump will go after if he’s reelected, saying without a trace of irony that “we’re gonna use the Constitution and the rule of law to go after you and hold you accountable.”

If Bannon is expecting the Supreme Court to use the Constitution to help him avoid accountability, he may be out of luck. Peter Navarro, the former director of the White House National Trade Council, was convicted of similar charges and tried the same thing, only to be rebuffed.

Representative Lauren Boebert wants to bring morality back. Ironic, no?

The Colorado Republican went off on a tangent Thursday evening while cheerleading Louisiana’s wild new law mandating that the Ten Commandments be hung in every public school classroom, from kindergarten to state university, on prison-bound Steve Bannon’s podcast.

The Louisiana legislation is a blatant violation of the separation between church and state created by the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution. To Boebert, it’s exactly what this country needs.

“I think this is something we need throughout our nation, and I am so proud of Governor Jeff Landry, he’s a wonderful man, a great friend of mine, and I’m glad he’s in that position and taking action because we need morals back in our nation, and back in our schools,” she said.

At this point, Boebert’s name has become so synonymous with her do-nothing record, as well as many humiliating scandals, that she is the last politician anyone would look to for moral guidance.

“If there is anything that we’re going to present in front of our children, it’s going to be, it should be the word of God because this is the one truth that is never going to change, and never going to leave them. It’s not some woke fad of the day that you can get canceled for believing in 10 years from now,” Boebert said.

There are about one million things that could be hung on the wall of a classroom that would (a) be true, and (b) not get you canceled in the future, without being an egregious violation of federal doctrine. Quick, someone tell her about multiplication tables!

“I don’t think it’s wrong to have something that says honor your father and mother, so that you will live a long life, that is the First Commandment that has a promise attached to it,” she continued. “I don’t think it’s bad to teach children that adultery is something that you should not do.” Boebert once fretted that if she ever left office, students might be taught “comprehensive sex-ed” in Colorado schools.

Boebert also took the opportunity to do a quick plug for the Big Lie.

“And also elicit in the Ten Commandments, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ and maybe the Left and some of these politicians are having a meltdown over having that right there listed in our classrooms.”

Whatever happened to “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” which Boebert seems to have conveniently forgotten?

Boebert’s zealous grandstanding marks the final week of her death crawl toward the Colorado primaries next Tuesday, when the far-right Republican will either be kept by constituents in her new district or brutally cast out.

Elusive right-wing billionaire Timothy Mellon made a massive donation—$50 million—to a Trump super PAC the day after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, according to disclosure filings. The donation is one of the largest single disclosed contributions ever, according to The New York Times, and one of the worst ways to burn $50 million, according to anyone with a functioning brain.

Mellon earned his wealth the way all hard-working Americans do: He inherited it from his grandfather, banking magnate and former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Timothy Mellon’s introduction into the world of being a political powerplayer started from humble, hateful beginnings in 2010 when he donated $1.5 million for legal fees to defend Arizona’s ultra-racist “show me your papers” law, Senate Bill 1070, in court. The reclusive 81-year-old went on to become a major player in conservative politics in 2018, when he spent big on conservatives in midterm elections that year.

Fast-forward to 2024, and Mellon has spent this year’s election blowing through cash on both Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaigns, previously donating equal amounts of $25 million to both. Because when your options are between a racist demagogue and a brain-wormed conspiracy theorist, why choose?

According to The Washington Post, Mellon has made a bunch of statements that would make your ultra-racist grandfather proud. His 2015 self-published autobiography included passages that said Black people became “even more belligerent” after the expansion of social programs in the 1960s and ’70s, called people receiving social services “slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam,” and described programs that help people not making enough money because billionaires hoard everything for themselves and dump money into presidential candidates who continue to cut their tax rates as “slavery redux.” Charming.

Prior to this latest billionaire boondoggle, Mellon donated $5 million to RFK Jr.’s campaign in April, according to The New York Times. Maybe he meant to give that same amount to Trump, accidentally added an extra zero and, being too wealthy for numbers to have meaning, just let it ride. Who knows. What we do know is that days after his donation, Make America Great Again Inc.—the super PAC that received the funds—stated it had raised $70 million in May (most of it Mellon’s) and had reserved $100 million in advertising in states where Trump already leads Biden.

Following his conviction, Trump’s campaign coffers now report having more cash on hand than Biden’s for the first time this election cycle—a feat that is expected to not last, as Biden gears up to collect two billion smackeroos in direct donations and another billy from outside groups with less prolifically heinous politics. According to The New York Times, Mellon’s spending spree has made him “the first donor to give $100 million in disclosed federal contributions in this year’s election,” an impressive investment that will nevertheless not be remembered by the sands of time.