In his three-hour interview with host Joe Rogan, Donald Trump delved into his false claims about voting, election fraud, and his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Rogan helped encourage some of these claims.
The interview, published late Friday, came on the same day that the former president, on his social media network, retweeted threats to sue lawyers, voters and election officials he considers to have “cheated” in the 2024 election.
Here’s a look at some of the Republican nominee for president’s claims and the truth.
Trump lost the 2020 election
What Trump said: “I won by a proverb – they say I lost by a proverb – I didn’t lose.”
THE FACTS: Trump lost in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump’s claims that fraud cost him the race have been repeatedly investigated.
Trump’s attorney general said there were no signs of major fraud. The Republican-run Michigan State Senate, one of the swing states in which Trump claimed fraud, reached the same conclusion after a lengthy investigation. An investigation by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Legislative Audit Office, ordered by the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature in another state in which Trump claimed he was defrauded to win, also found no significant fraud.
Rogan laughed as Trump argued, correctly, that his loss was close. Trump narrowly lost the election in six swing states. If about 81,000 votes had been reversed, Trump could have won Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin, and received enough support in the Electoral College to remain president.
Trump made a mistake in mentioning this margin, which amounted to 22,000 votes.
Judges have ruled against Trump on the merits again and again
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What Trump said: “What happened is the judges didn’t want to touch it. They will say: You have no standing. They did not rule on the merits.”
Facts: This is not true. Trump and his supporters lost more than 50 lawsuits in their attempt to overturn the election.
A group of Republican-affiliated election lawyers and legal scholars reviewed all of Trump’s lawsuits challenging the 2020 election and found that only 20 were dismissed by judges before a hearing on the merits. In 30 cases, rulings against Trump came after hearings on the merits.
In the remaining 14 cases, the report from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University found, Trump and his allies dropped their lawsuits before they even reached the merits stage. “In many cases, after making exaggerated allegations of wrongdoing, Trump’s legal representatives showed up at court or state proceedings empty-handed, then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims,” the report said.
Almost every state already uses paper ballots
What Trump said: “We should go to paper ballots.”
The Facts: Both Trump and Rogan argued that voting machines are unreliable and that the United States should rely on paper ballots. Trump even cited his billionaire supporter Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for such a change.
However, almost all parts of the country have already made this shift.
In 2020, more than 90% of election authorities in the United States used paper ballots, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The following year, the Federal Election Assistance Commission changed its guidelines to recommend each jurisdiction’s use paper.
The only state that does not use paper ballots or any type of paper is Louisiana, which is run by Republicans.
Republicans and Democrats have encouraged mail-in voting during the pandemic
What Trump said: “They used the coronavirus to cheat.”
THE FACTS: Trump’s central argument is that a major Democratic conspiracy changed voting procedures during the coronavirus pandemic to make mail-in voting more popular, and that conspirators then rigged the election against him through those mail-in votes. This is not what happened.
When the pandemic first hit during the 2020 presidential primaries in March, Republican and Democratic election officials quickly turned to encouraging mail-in voting to avoid crowded ballot boxes. This was relatively uncontroversial until Trump turned against it, claiming it would sow the seeds of potential fraud.
In doing so, Trump was returning to the usual playbook, claiming that any election he did not win was fraudulent. He made this claim about the first contest he lost, the 2016 Iowa Republican caucus. He even claimed that he lost the popular vote in 2016 due to illegal immigrants voting, though the presidential commission he set up to find evidence of it was disbanded without finding On any evidence.
The 2020 elections were free of significant fraud
The Facts: Isolated cases of voter fraud have long occurred, but in modern times they have not reached the levels necessary to influence national elections. An Associated Press review found fewer than 475 cases in all six battleground states that Trump lost by more than 300,000 votes — too few to change the outcome.
& Edition 2024 The Canadian Press
