Trump took his 2020 election fraud fib straight from his #1 favorite movie, Citizen Kane

Immediately after the November 3, 2020, presidential election, Trump promulgated the claim that there was fraud at the polls and he was the actual winner. Associates of his followed up on that lie with a full gamut of illegal activity, culminating in the January 6, 2021, US capitol riot.¹ This claim of mass election fraud became an accepted dogma among his supporters and a core credo of the now Trump-controlled GOP. Yet Trump lifted this "fraud at polls" fable verbatim from Citizen Kane, which, as the The New York Times and other sources reported, he characterized as "my all-time favorite movie."²

The film's title character is a newspaper publisher, Charles Foster Kane, with whom Trump said he identified,³ who runs for governor of New York. Kane had two headlines ready to be printed once the election results were determined. They were "Kane Elected" in the event of an election victory and "Fraud at Polls!" for a loss. Trump, a notorious cheater at golf, who has repeatedly gone to absurd lengths to avoid acknowledging a loss (the "Commander in Cheat"), replicated that "fraud at polls" claim from his favorite movie after his own 2020 election loss.

1. The New York Times, "77 Days: Trump's Campaign to Subvert the Election," June 14, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/us/trump-election-lie.html.
2. The New York Times, "Maples in Spotlight on Opening Night," August 4, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/04/nyregion/maples-in-spotlight-on-opening-night.html; Politico, "Megyn Kelly doesn't exactly grill Donald Trump," May 18, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/trump-kelly-223303.
3. Politico, "How Trump's Favorite Movie Explains Him," June 6, 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/donald-trump-2016-citizen-kane-213943/.