On Wednesday, calling into Fox Business to speak with host Maria Bartiromo, President Trump accused social media companies like Google and Twitter of attempting to “rig the election” and suggested they should be sued, adding, “You may need legislation to create competition.”
This week, Project Veritas released footage of Jen Gennai, Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation, saying: “We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’ve rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again.”
Bartiromo prompted Trump’s remarks by saying, “Mr. President, you mentioned technology companies. How concerned are you that technology companies are censoring conservatives, and they’re going to do this right up to the 2020 election?”
Trump answered, “Well, they’re doing it to me on Twitter. What they did to me on Twitter is incredible. You know, I have millions and millions of followers, but I will tell you, they make it very hard for people to join me on Twitter and they make it very much harder for me to get out the message.”
Bartiromo asked, “What are you going to do about it? These companies have an enormous amount of power if they can even stop the president of the free world from getting his message out. “
Trump replied, “What am I going to do about it? These people are all Democrats. It’s totally biased towards Democrats. If I announce tomorrow that I’m going to become a nice liberal Democrat, I would pick up five times more followers. I was picking up a hundred thousand followers every few days, and all of a sudden — I’m much hotter now than I was a number of months ago, a number of months ago, then all of a sudden it stopped. Now I pick up a lot but I don’t pick up nearly what I did —”
Bartiromo pointed out, “Devin Nunes is suing Twitter.”
Trump responded, “That’s great. I think he’s great … He’s right about it. Twitter is just terrible, what they do; they don’t let you get the word out — I’ve had so many people come to me, ‘Sir, I just can’t join you on Twitter.’ I see what’s happening. 100%.”
Bartiromo queried, “Would you rather see competition or do you want to see legislation coming down to actually — “
Trump interjected, “You may need legislation to create competition. Look, it’s amazing that I won the election, because you saw what happened yesterday with Google. Google is totally biased. They talk about Russia, they had some bloggers, and by the way, those bloggers, some of them were going both ways; they were going both for Clinton and for Trump.”
Bartiromo asked, “Somebody at Google said they don’t want to happen what happened in 2016 to happen in 2020. They don’t want it to happen again. Is that what you’re referring to?”
Trump replied, “Let me tell you, they’re trying to rig the election. That’s what we should be looking at, not the witch hunt, the phony witch hunt which has proven zero.”
Bartiromo pressed, “Is what technology companies are doing to you, what they did to you, is that legal? Are they breaking the law, Mr. President?”
Trump concluded, “Well, I don’t know. But I tell you what, they should be sued, because what’s happening with the bias— and now you see it, with that executive yesterday from Google, the hatred for the Republicans. It’s not even like, ‘Gee, let’s lean Democrat.’ The hatred! And actually, you know, I heard that all during my election. It’s hard that I won. They were swamping us with negative stuff.”
Video below;