Fox News host Brian Kilmeade hits Trump on Arizona election claim: 'That's an outright lie'

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade criticized former President Trump on his radio show on Fox Nation on Monday for Trump's past remarks regarding false election claims about winning the state of Arizona, which Kilmeade called "an outright lie."

"Right now, nobody cares about 2020," Kilmeade told a caller named Logan, who said he was a Trump supporter who found it "cringeworthy" that the former president continued to voice his objection to the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed was rigged against him. The caller said he was concerned that staying focused on 2020 would hinder Trump's chances should he choose to run in 2024.

Referring to remarks Trump made recently at a rally in Arizona, a state he has falsely said he won despite President Biden's victory there, Kilmeade said he spoke to two of Trump's friends who told him, "That was the worst speech you ever gave. Because nobody cares about your topics."

"There is so much to talk about that matters to you and I, Logan, right now about what's happening in the Ukraine, how China is just forgetting about phase one, how they're beginning to militarize everything around them, about to take Taiwan back," Kilmeade said. "That's what people wanna talk about. It's not hard stuff."

Kilmeade reiterated a notion from some Republicans who have encouraged Trump to focus on what they see were his successes instead of focusing on the 2020 election results.

"Nobody cares about 2020. Nobody. And everything that he said and the challenges that he made should have been done before the election. And they did a recount in Arizona, and the recount showed no difference almost, and he came out and said it showed that they won Arizona. That's an outright lie, and please stop wasting our time with that, because he's capable of doing so much more," Kilmeade said.

Trump lost Arizona to Biden in 2020. The state's GOP-controlled Senate ordered an audit of the results in Maricopa County following the 2020 election, which found that Biden won the county by a larger margin than the final certified results showed.

Biden was the first Democrat to win in Arizona since former President Clinton. Biden beat Trump by just under 11,000 votes, or roughly three-tenths of a percentage point.

Since then, the state has proposed a bill that would eliminate most early and absentee voting and require most people to vote in their home precincts.