In his three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Donald Trump dug in on his false claims about voting, election fraud and his loss within the 2020 presidential election. Rogan helped encourage a few of these claims.
The interview, launched late Friday, got here on the identical day that the previous president, on his social media community, re-posted threats to prosecute attorneys, voters and election officers he deems to have “cheated” within the 2024 election.
Right here’s a take a look at a few of the claims by the Republican nominee for president and the reality.
Trump did lose the 2020 election
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “I received by like — they are saying I misplaced by like — I didn’t lose.”
THE FACTS: Trump did lose in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump’s claims that fraud value him the race have been investigated repeatedly.
Trump’s personal legal professional basic stated there have been no indicators of serious fraud. The Republican-run state Senate in Michigan, one of many swing states the place Trump claimed fraud occurred, got here to the identical conclusion after a prolonged investigation. An investigation by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau in Wisconsin, ordered by the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature in one other state Trump claimed to have been defrauded from profitable, additionally discovered no substantial fraud.
Rogan chortled when Trump was arguing, accurately, that his loss was shut. Trump misplaced the election narrowly in six swing states. If about 81,000 votes had flipped, Trump might have received Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin and gotten sufficient help within the Electoral School to stay president.
Trump misstated that margin as 22,000 votes.
Judges dominated towards Trump on the deserves repeatedly
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WHAT TRUMP SAID: “What occurred is judges don’t wish to contact it. They might say, ‘you don’t have standing.’ They didn’t rule on the deserves.”
THE FACTS: That’s not true. Trump and his supporters misplaced greater than 50 lawsuits making an attempt to overturn the election.
A gaggle of Republican-affiliated election attorneys and authorized students reviewed all 64 of the Trump lawsuits difficult the 2020 election and located solely 20 of them have been dismissed by judges earlier than a listening to on the deserves. In 30 circumstances, the rulings towards Trump got here after hearings on the deserves.
Within the remaining 14 circumstances, the report for Stanford College’s Hoover Establishment discovered, Trump and his allies dropped their lawsuits earlier than they even received to the deserves part. “In lots of circumstances, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing, Trump’s authorized representatives confirmed up in court docket or state proceedings empty-handed, after which returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the identical unsupported claims,” the report states.
Nearly each state already makes use of paper ballots
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “We must always go to paper ballots.”
THE FACTS: Trump and Rogan each argued that voting machines are unreliable and that america ought to depend on paper ballots. Trump even cited his billionaire tech mogul supporter Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for such a change.
Nearly the entire nation already made that change, nevertheless.
In 2020, greater than 90% of the election jurisdictions within the U.S. used paper ballots, in line with the Brennan Middle for Justice. The subsequent 12 months, the federal Election Help Fee modified its tips to suggest each jurisdiction use paper.
The one state to not use a voting system with paper ballots or a paper path of any kind is Republican-run Louisiana.
Republicans and Democrats inspired mail voting throughout the pandemic
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “They used COVID to cheat.”
THE FACTS: Trump’s central argument is {that a} grand Democratic conspiracy modified voting procedures throughout the coronavirus pandemic to make mail voting extra well-liked and that the conspirators then rigged the election towards him by means of these mail votes. That’s not what occurred.
When the pandemic first hit throughout the 2020 presidential major in March, Republican and Democratic election officers shortly switched to encourage mail voting to keep away from crowded polls. This was comparatively uncontroversial till Trump turned towards it, claiming it might lay the seeds for potential fraud.
In doing so, Trump was returning to his common playbook, claiming that any election he doesn’t win is fraudulent. He made that declare concerning the first contest he misplaced, Iowa’s 2016 Republican caucus. He even claimed he misplaced the favored vote in 2016 due to voting by unlawful immigrants, although a presidential fee he empaneled to seek out proof of it disbanded with out discovering any proof.
The 2020 election was free of serious fraud
THE FACTS: Remoted circumstances of voters fraud have lengthy occurred, however in trendy occasions haven’t reached the degrees wanted to sway a nationwide election. An Related Press evaluation discovered fewer than 475 circumstances in all six battleground states that Trump misplaced by greater than a mixed 300,000 votes — far too little to vary the end result.
