Donald Trump called for the criminal prosecution of Google by the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) during a flurry of unhinged tweets Friday on his social media platform Truth Social. And in any other political era, this kind of bizarre screed would be front-page news for weeks. Here in 2024, it’s just another Friday.
Trump, a convicted felon and serious presidential candidate, insists that Google is somehow only showing negative news stories about the former president while showing positive stories about his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump is clearly frustrated by the news coverage he’s receiving, especially since he’s doing so poorly in recent polls.
“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump tweeted Friday afternoon.
Trump claimed this amounts to “illegal activity” and said that if the Justice Department doesn’t do something to prosecute the tech giant, he’ll do it himself—that is if he’s able to take power again.
“This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections. If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!” Trump wrote.
Notably, Google and the U.S. Department of Justice are in court right now but it has nothing to do with “election interference” as Trump calls it. The DOJ is suing over Google’s alleged ad tech monopoly.
Where did Trump get this idea that Google is only showing negative stories about the Republican candidate and only positive stories about Harris? That part isn’t entirely clear. But there’s a good chance it’s something he saw on Fox News, given the fact that he’s constantly watching TV and spewing his idiotic thoughts about it on Truth Social.
But this isn’t the first time Trump has accused Google of being manipulated to work against him. The rambling boomer even said the company’s search results were “rigged” in 2018, a time when he was the President of the United States and arguably the most powerful person in the world.
“Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal?” Trump tweeted back in August 2018.
Trump has also threatened to toss other tech figures in jail, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has recently tried to distance himself from anything associated with Democratic causes. In fact, Zuckerberg has reportedly had at least two phone calls with Trump in recent months, according to the New York Times, and described Trump as “badass” after the first attempted assassination against the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania this past July.
Trump has become increasingly unmoored from reality since leaving the White House in January 2021, floating ridiculous conspiracy theories and making repeated false claims about any number of topics. The former president attempted a coup at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th that failed to overturn the election results, and Trump has been stewing ever since, lashing out at perceived enemies and writing bizarre all-caps tweets late into the night.
And now that Harris is doing generally well in the polls, the former president is clearly saying anything he can in order to muddy the waters and perhaps explain why he might be losing. In this case, it’s Trump trying to claim that the only reason he’s doing poorly is that Americans are seeing negative stories about him.
Harris is doing very well, according to the most recent major polls. As of Friday, the Democrat is up 2.8 points based on FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, though the U.S. doesn’t choose presidents based on something so silly and simple as the popular vote. But Harris is doing well in the crucial battleground states.
Harris is up 3 points over Trump in Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, according to a new poll from Bloomberg released Thursday. And she’s up 7 points in Nevada, 5 points in Pennsylvania, and 2 points in North Carolina. Georgia, another swing state, is where the two candidates are polling dead even, though other polls show Harris doing much better there. However, Harris supporters are rightly nervous about what could happen when voters actually go to the polls in November, especially after it looked like Hillary Clinton was doing very well in polling back in 2016 before losing the Electoral College vote.
A request for comment to Google on Friday wasn’t immediately returned. Gizmodo will update this post if we hear back.
