LAST RESORT

Trump Clings to ‘Best Pollster’ Accused of Faking PhD

Trump tweeted Sunday that a top polling expert in Britain backed his fraud claims—but the little-known “expert” has been accused of inventing his credentials.

President Trump finally found someone serious-sounding to back his baseless claims of massive U.S. election fraud, tweeting on Sunday that the “best pollster in Britain wrote this morning that this clearly was a stolen election.” Unfortunately for Trump, the man in question, Patrick Basham, is actually a tobacco industry apologist who was accused of faking his academic history in the British Medical Journal. After Basham wrote a piece in the BMJ downplaying the obesity epidemic, a British professor responded in the journal saying that Basham had never received a PhD from Cambridge University as he had claimed. Basham, who was once an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, has recently been writing for the British tabloid the Sunday Express. The director of the little-known Democracy Institute—which says it is based in Washington, D.C., and London—claimed before the election that Trump would win in a landslide. On Sunday, Basham claimed in his latest column that widespread fraud was the only reasonable explanation for why his outlandish prediction had proven to be so badly wrong.