Jonathan Lemire is the host of the morning news show Way Too Early on MSNBC and a regular on Morning Joe, as well as a frequent guest on Deadline White House with Nicolle Wallace and The 11th Hour with Brian Williams. He is also the White House bureau chief for Politico.

Lemire’s first book, The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020, releases July 26, 2022. It is a probing and illuminating analysis of the current state of American politics, focusing on Donald Trump’s lie about election fraud. The big lie, as it’s been named, isn’t just about the 2020 election. It has become a political philosophy that has only further divided the two parties, and this is the first book to examine this unprecedented and tenuous moment in our nation’s politics.

In an exclusive interview with Smashing Interviews Magazine, Lemire, MSNBC's Way Too Early host, details the thesis of his exposé on Trump's election fraud fallacy in his debut book, The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020:

Smashing Interviews Magazine: Jonathan, The Big Lie is a great read and a look back on an important time in history. For those who don’t know, explain what the big lie is and why it was so important to write about it now.

Jonathan Lemire: Appreciate that, and thanks for having me. The big lie has become the name for former president Trump’s false assertion of election fraud pertaining to the 2020 presidential election and his basic claim that he, in fact, had won as opposed to Joe Biden. That, of course, was not true. There is no evidence of any widespread voter fraud, but it is a myth he perpetuated in the days after the elction.

What this book examines is that Trump actually planted the seeds years and years before. In fact, I trace it to an otherwise nondescript campaign rally he held in August of 2016, in preparation for had he lost that Fall, which of course, he did not. What the book traces is how he hijacked the Republican Party and the conservative media to go along with that big lie, which he then, of course, accelerated after election day in 2020. It, in many ways, culminated in what we saw in the insurrection of the Capitol on January 6th. But that doesn’t end the story, and the book continues and shows how that big lie, how that claim of voter fraud, still defines our politics today up until here we are in the middle of 2022.

So the book traces all that and shows how both parties, Republicans and Democrats, are dealing with it. It was time for me to write it now because Donald Trump very much is still part of our political hubris making noise about declaring a candidacy for president again in 2024. But even short of that, candidates who endorsed the big lie are running for office this year. There are Republican state legislators who are trying to rig the system to make it easier to pick their favorite candidates and defy the will of the people perhaps in elections, and this is something the Biden White House is dealing with as well in its fight, to this point in its unsuccessful fight, to preserve voting rights on a federal level.

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