In his three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Donald Trump expanded 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 the same day the former president posted renewed threats on his social media network to prosecute lawyers, voters and election officials he deems “cheated” in the 2024 election.
Here’s a look at some of the Republican nominee for president’s claims and the truth.
Trump did indeed lose the 2020 election
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “I won by about – they say I lost by about – I didn’t lose.”
THE FACTS: Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. Trump’s claims that fraud cost him the race have been repeatedly investigated.
Trump’s own attorney general said there was no sign of significant fraud. The Republican-led Senate in Michigan, one of the swing states where Trump alleged fraud, came to the same conclusion after a lengthy investigation. An investigation by Wisconsin’s nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, commissioned by the Republican Party-controlled legislature in another state that Trump claimed he was defrauded by winning, also found no substantial fraud.
Rogan chuckled when Trump rightly argued that his loss was close. Trump narrowly lost the election in six swing states. If about 81,000 votes had been flipped, Trump could have won Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin and gained enough support in the Electoral College to remain president.
Trump incorrectly reported that margin as 22,000 votes.
Judges repeatedly ruled against Trump on the merits
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “What’s happened is judges don’t want to touch it. They would say, ‘You have no status.’ They did not judge the merits.”
THE FACTS: That’s not true. Trump and his supporters lost more than fifty lawsuits in their attempt to overturn the election.
A group of Republican-affiliated election attorneys and legal scholars reviewed all 64 of Trump’s lawsuits challenging the 2020 election and found that only 20 of them had been 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 from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution found, Trump and his allies dropped their lawsuits before they even got to the merits stage. “In many cases, after making outrageous claims of misconduct, Trump’s legal representatives showed up empty-handed in court or state proceedings, then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims,” it said report.
Nearly every state already uses paper ballots
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “We need to move 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 Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for such a change.
However, almost the entire country has already made that switch.
More than 90% of U.S. election jurisdictions used paper ballots in 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The following year, the federal Election Assistance Commission changed its guidelines to recommend the use of paper in every jurisdiction.
The only state that does not use a voting system with paper ballots or any paper trail is Republican-controlled Louisiana.
Republicans and Democrats encouraged mail-in voting during the pandemic
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “They used COVID to cheat.”
THE FACTS: Trump’s central argument is that a vast Democratic conspiracy changed voting procedures during the coronavirus pandemic to make voting by mail more popular, and that the conspirators then rigged the election against him using those mail-in votes. That’s not what happened.
When the pandemic first hit during the 2020 presidential election in March, Republican and Democratic election officials quickly moved to encourage mail-in voting to avoid overcrowded polls. This was relatively uncontroversial until Trump turned against it, claiming it would sow the seeds of potential fraud.
With that, Trump returned to his usual playbook, claiming that any election he doesn’t win is fraudulent. He made that claim about the first contest he lost, the 2016 Republican caucus in Iowa. He even claimed that he lost the 2016 popular vote because of the vote of illegal immigrants, although a presidential commission he called in to find evidence was disbanded without finding any evidence.
The 2020 election was free of significant fraud
THE FACTS: Isolated cases of voter fraud have occurred for some time, but in modern times have not reached the level necessary to influence national elections. An Associated Press review found that Trump had lost fewer than 475 votes in all six battleground states by a total of more than 300,000 votes — far too few to change the outcome.
