Trump tweets bizarre string of Steve Hilton clips without comment as he rages at election defeat

Trump shares a series of Fox News clips involving the former adviser to David Cameron, demanding an investigation into claims of voter fraud

A day after networks and news agencies declared his defeat in the presidential election, Donald Trump has continued to rage against supposed fraud and election meddling in swing states that he claims cost him his victory.  

In a series of tweets on Sunday, offered without further comment, Mr Trump shared videos of a Fox News show anchored by Steve Hilton, formerly the top adviser to Britain’s ex-prime minister David Cameron.

The clips combined have been viewed millions of times, and include a nearly 10-minute long monologue in which Hilton demands a “fair investigation” into unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

Since leaving Mr Cameron’s team in 2012, Hilton has been an avid Trump supporter and backed him over his Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton for the 2016 election.  

Accusing Democrats of “reckless and condescending intolerance,” Hilton said: “For four years, they plotted and schemed to undermine and overturn the sacred right of American democracy. For four years, they smeared the duly elected president and his supporters. ‘Not my President’ they screamed, ‘not my president’. Four years on, still they are at it.”  

In an impassioned appeal for an investigation into alleged voter fraud, Hilton asked: “How could any reasonable person not agree that every legal vote should be counted? No illegal vote should be counted. Any evidence of fraud or irregularity should be brought forward and the court should adjudicate,” adding that this is what “the president said. That’s what Mitt Romney said. It’s even what Biden said.”

Hilton went on to argue that “every election has some level of fraud, irregularity, error,” but it usually “doesn’t affect the outcome”.  

“But when it’s this close. This important with this many late changes to the rules, of course, we should investigate them thoroughly. Not just for the sake of the win but for the sake of faith in our system.”  

He also attacked Fox’s rival news networks, saying that if the “positions were reversed, every single Democrat, every Biden propagandist on CNN and NBC and everywhere else would be telling Biden to fight and fight and fight to the end.”  

But he did concede that any recount and probe should be done without raising “false hope”. “Trump supporters have been through a lot. Of course, we want that Trump second term. But do not give us false hope that it can still be achieved if, in fact, it cannot.”

Hilton is not the only Briton to whom Mr Trump has turned in recent days in relation to the election. On Saturday, he sparked some confusion by tweeting that “the best pollster in Britain wrote this morning that this clearly was a stolen election". The tweet has, like many others by Mr Trump in the past week, since been marked as “disputed” by the social networking site.  

The claim seems to refer to a column written in the Sunday Express by Patrick Basham, a Washington DC-based individual running a little-known think tank by the name of “Democracy Institute”.  

Mr Basham has reportedly spent the past year publishing US election polling in partnership with the Sunday Express, claiming to have a unique approach aimed at identifying shy Republican voters. The polls, mostly showing strong Trump leads, have found a receptive audience for the British paper among US-based Trump supporters.

In another article published in the Sunday Express, Mr Basham dismissed the claims that he had incorrectly judged Mr Trump’s popularity, insisting his polling had “pretty much nailed” the election. He blamed the “mountain of evidence, direct and circumstantial, of widespread ballot fraud” for declared results that did not resemble the Trump landslide his body of work had predicted.  

The Trump campaign has so far filed at least seven lawsuits in battleground states since election day to challenge the ballot counts, without providing any definitive evidence of voting irregularities. In the meantime, more than one hundred world leaders have congratulated president-election Joe Biden.