FACT FOCUS: Trump repeated election lies in his interview with Joe Rogan. Here are the facts
In his three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Donald Trump dug in on his false claims about voting, election fraud and his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Rogan helped encourage some of these claims.
The interview, released late Friday, came on the same day that the former president, on his social media network, re-posted threats to prosecute lawyers, voters and election officials he deems to have “cheated” in the 2024 election.
Here's a look at some of the claims by the Republican nominee for president and the truth.
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “I won by like — they say I lost by like — I didn’t lose.”
THE FACTS: Trump did lose in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump's claims that fraud cost him the race were investigated repeatedly.
Trump's own attorney general said there were no signs of significant fraud. The Republican-run state Senate in Michigan, one of the swing states where Trump claimed fraud occurred, came to the same conclusion after a lengthy investigation. An investigation by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau in Wisconsin, ordered by the state's GOP-controlled Legislature in another state Trump claimed to have been defrauded from winning, also found no substantial fraud.
Rogan chortled when Trump was arguing, correctly, that his loss was close. Trump lost the election narrowly in six swing states. If about 81,000 votes had flipped, Trump could have won Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin and gotten enough support in the Electoral College to remain president.
Trump misstated that margin as 22,000 votes.
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “What happened is judges don’t want to touch it. They would say, ‘you don’t have standing.’ They didn’t rule on the merits.”
THE FACTS: That’s not true. Trump and his supporters lost more than 50 lawsuits trying to overturn the election.
A group of Republican-affiliated election lawyers and legal scholars reviewed all 64 of the Trump lawsuits challenging the 2020 election and found only 20 of them were dismissed by judges before a hearing on the merits. In 30 cases, the rulings against Trump came after hearings on the merits.
In the remaining 14 cases, the report for Stanford University's Hoover Institution found, Trump and his allies dropped their lawsuits before they even got to the merits phase. “In many cases, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing, Trump’s legal representatives showed up in court or state proceedings empty-handed, and then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims,” the report states.
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “We should go to paper ballots.”
THE FACTS: Trump and Rogan both argued that voting machines are unreliable and that the United States should rely on paper ballots. Trump even cited his billionaire tech mogul supporter Elon Musk's enthusiasm for such a change.
Almost all of the country already made that switch, however.
In 2020, more than 90% of the election jurisdictions in the U.S. used paper ballots, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The next year, the federal Election Assistance Commission changed its guidelines to recommend every jurisdiction use paper.
The only state not to use a voting system with paper ballots or a paper trail of any sort is Republican-run Louisiana.
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “They used COVID to cheat.”
THE FACTS: Trump's central argument is that a grand Democratic conspiracy changed voting procedures during the coronavirus pandemic to make mail voting more popular and that the conspirators then rigged the election against him through those mail votes. That's not what happened.
When the pandemic first hit during the 2020 presidential primary in March, Republican and Democratic election officials quickly switched to encourage mail voting to avoid crowded polls. This was relatively uncontroversial until Trump turned against it, claiming it would lay the seeds for potential fraud.
In doing so, Trump was returning to his usual playbook, claiming that any election he doesn't win is fraudulent. He made that claim about the first contest he lost, Iowa's 2016 Republican caucus. He even claimed he lost the popular vote in 2016 because of voting by illegal immigrants, though a presidential commission he empaneled to find evidence of it disbanded without finding any proof.
THE FACTS: Isolated cases of voters fraud have long occurred, but in modern times have not reached the levels needed to sway a national election. An Associated Press review found fewer than 475 cases in all six battleground states that Trump lost by more than a combined 300,000 votes — far too little to change the outcome.
