Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said Thursday that former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lost the election because he “did not want to be president of the United States,” AL.com reported.
O’Reilly told the crowd at a Faulkner University fundraiser that he asked Romney to appear on “The O’Reilly Factor” for an entire hour the Monday night before the election, after the Obama campaign turned down an offer to split the hour.
“We never got an answer,” O’Reilly said, as quoted by AL.com. “We never got a reason. They just didn’t do it.”
“So we’re sitting there going, ‘Does this guy want to lose?’ The answer is yes, he did not want to be president of the United States, and that’s why he lost,” he continued.
To further prove that Romney “did not want to win the election,” O’Reilly said the former Massachusetts governor missed a crucial opportunity to gain the upper hand in the third presidential debate. He faulted Romney for not directly confronting the president about last year’s deadly attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the deaths of four Americans.
“It would have knocked him right out,” O’Reilly said. “He could not have answered. He would have evaded it. He didn’t have the answers. He could have just won the election right there.”
