Chris Wallace on today’s ‘ugly and twisted’ politics — and which election truly was ‘stolen’

Chris Wallace says you can’t “fully understand how ugly and twisted our politics is today” without rewinding history more than six decades.

That’s just what the CNN anchor does in his new book with Mitch Weiss, “Countdown 1960: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the 312 Days That Changed America’s Politics Forever,” which details the White House race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

“The story, in and of itself, is fascinating, but the driving force in my writing it is because it kind of sets the events of 2020 and what we’re currently going through on its head,” Wallace told ITK in an interview.

“I think there’s good reason to believe that the election of 1960 was really stolen,” the “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” host said. 

Nixon, serving as President Eisenhower’s vice president at the time, lost the election and faced pressure from Eisenhower and his party to contest it, Wallace said, but instead, he decided “essentially at the height of the Cold War … that he is going to accept the election and refuses to contest it.”

“In fact, on his Jan. 6 in 1961, as the vice president, [Nixon] ends up overseeing the counting of the electoral vote and declaring that Jack Kennedy has beaten him, even though he thought Kennedy had stolen the election.”

Wallace said what captured his attention with the story were the obvious parallels between the 2020 election and the race that launched the country into the 1960s.

“What’s going on now is a reverse of everything that happened then,” Wallace said. 

“It’s got such relevance and resonance to what’s going on today,” the 76-year-old, award-winning journalist said of his latest book, released Tuesday.

Former President Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was “rigged.” The 45th president was subsequently criminally indicted in Georgia over his efforts to overturn the state’s election results in 2020 and indicted federally in Washington, D.C., for his attempts to overturn the election results and remain in power.

“Trump just has rewritten the rules” of covering presidential politics since Wallace first started reporting on then-Sen. Ted Kennedy’s (Mass.) Democratic primary bid against President Carter in 1980.

“How many times in the 2016 campaign did [Trump] say things that you thought, ‘Well, this is just so far over the line that nobody can survive this’? And of course, he did, and he got elected,” Wallace said.

“Ever since then, the ‘rules of the road of American politics’ as I grew up knowing them as a teenager, and then starting in my 20s covering presidential politics — it’s all been rewritten.”

Pointing to Trump’s recent comments about “Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets and slitting their throats and Kamala Harris is mentally disabled,” Wallace said, “Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that politics, one, would be conducted this way, and two, that despite all of that, that this election, as we sit here today, is still very much up for grabs.”

Asked whether he predicted Trump might agree to a second presidential debate against Harris, Wallace replied, “I think it’s up for grabs.”

“If the polls show that Harris has moved out to a clear lead, which they haven’t so far, that’ll put a lot more pressure on Trump to debate,” said Wallace, who moderated a famously messy 2020 debate between Trump and Biden.

“I thought he got clobbered in September, and the polls all indicated he got clobbered,” Wallace said of Trump’s first, and so far only, debate against Harris.

“I don’t know that he wants to. He sure didn’t look like he had fun in that debate. And I don’t know that he’d want to give her a platform of 50 or 60 or 70 million people to do it again.”