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 dealt with his false statements about voting, voter fraud and his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Rogan helped fuel some of these claims.

The interview, released on Friday evening, came on the same day that the former president, on his social network, reposted it threats to go after lawyers, voters and election officials they believe “cheated” them in the 2024 election.

Here’s a look at some of the Republican presidential nominee’s claims and the truth.

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “We won by like – they say we lost by like – we 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 significant fraud. The Republican-led state senate in Michigan, one of the swing states where Trump claimed fraud occurred, reached the same conclusion after a lengthy investigation. An investigation by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Office into Wisconsinordered by the GOP-controlled state Legislature in another state that Trump claimed he was rigged to win, found no substantial fraud.

Rogan chuckled as Trump correctly argued that his loss was close. Trump lost the election in six swing states. If about 81,000 votes had flipped, Trump could have won Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin and received enough support in the Electoral College to remain president.

Trump misreported that margin as 22,000 votes.

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “What’s happened is the judges don’t want to touch it. They said, “You don’t have legs.” They did not rule on the merits.”

THE FACTS: Not true. Trump and his supporters lost over 50 processes trying to overturn the election.

A group of Republican-affiliated election lawyers and journalists reviewed all 64 Trump lawsuits challenging the 2020 election and found that only 20 of them 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 for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution found, Trump and his allies abandoned their lawsuits before they even reached the merits phase. “In many cases, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing, Trump’s legal representatives have shown up in court or state proceedings empty-handed, then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims,” ​​the report said.

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “We should go to paper ballots.”

THE FACTS: Trump and Rogan have 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.

However, almost the entire country has already made this change.

In 2020, more than 90 percent of US election jurisdictions used paper ballots, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The following year, the Federal Election Assistance Commission changed its guidelines to recommend the document for use by each jurisdiction.

The only state that does not use a ballot voting system or a paper trail of any kind is run by Republicans. Louisiana.

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 mail-in voting more popular, and that the conspirators then rigged the election against him through those mail-in votes. That’s not what happened.

When the pandemic first hit during the 2020 presidential primaries in March, Republican and Democratic election officials moved quickly to encourage mail-in voting to avoid crowded ballots. This was relatively uncontroversial until Trump turned on it, claiming it would plant the seeds of potential fraud.

In doing so, Trump reverted to his usual playbook, claiming that any election he doesn’t win is fraudulent. He made this claim about the first contest he lost, the Iowa Republican caucus in 2016. He even claimed he lost the popular vote in 2016 because of the illegal immigrant vote, though a presidential commission he assembled to find evidence in this sense it was abolished without finding any evidence.

THE FACTS: Isolated cases of voter fraud have long occurred, but in modern times have not reached the levels necessary to influence national elections. Found a review from the Associated Press less than 475 cases in all six battleground states, Trump lost by more than 300,000 votes combined — far too few to change the outcome.