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.
This is a take a look at a number 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 price him the race have been investigated repeatedly.
Trump’s personal legal professional common 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, appropriately, that his loss was shut. Trump misplaced the election narrowly in six swing states. If about 81,000 votes had flipped, Trump may have received Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin and gotten sufficient help within the Electoral Faculty to stay president.
Trump misstated that margin as 22,000 votes.
Judges dominated in opposition to Trump on the deserves repeatedly
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “What occurred is judges don’t need 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 attempting to overturn the election.
A bunch 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 instances, the rulings in opposition to Trump got here after hearings on the deserves.
Within the remaining 14 instances, the report for Stanford College’s Hoover Establishment discovered, Trump and his allies dropped their lawsuits earlier than they even acquired to the deserves section. “In lots of instances, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing, Trump’s authorized representatives confirmed up in courtroom 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 should always go to paper ballots.”
THE FACTS: Trump and Rogan each argued that voting machines are unreliable and that the USA 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 swap, nonetheless.
In 2020, greater than 90% of the election jurisdictions within the U.S. used paper ballots, in line with the Brennan Heart for Justice. The following 12 months, the federal Election Help Fee modified its tips to advocate each jurisdiction use paper.
The one state to not use a voting system with paper ballots or a paper path of any type 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 in opposition to him by way of these mail votes. That is not what occurred.
When the pandemic first hit throughout the 2020 presidential main 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 in opposition to 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 would not win is fraudulent. He made that declare in regards to 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 search out proof of it disbanded with out discovering any proof.
The 2020 election was free of serious fraud
THE FACTS: Remoted instances of voters fraud have lengthy occurred, however in trendy instances haven’t reached the degrees wanted to sway a nationwide election. An Related Press evaluation discovered fewer than 475 instances in all six battleground states that Trump misplaced by greater than a mixed 300,000 votes — far too little to vary the end result.