Trump’s ‘Most Important’ Speech Was Mostly False
In what he billed as perhaps “the most important speech I’ve ever made,” President Donald Trump continued his attempt to deceive the American public into believing the election was “rigged.”
Trump has presented no evidence for such an explosive charge. Nor have his lawyers, who have admitted as much in some of their many dismissed lawsuits. Instead, the evidence shows Trump is inventing and pushing conspiracy theories and other false and misleading claims in an unrelenting attack on U.S. elections.
We’ve fact-checked his false claims about voter fraud for months, and even years, dating back to the 2016 campaign, long before he lost his reelection bid to President-elect Joe Biden. But on Dec. 2, 49 days before he is set to leave office, Trump once again repeated a slew of assertions in a nearly 46-minute video he posted to social media.
The speech came one day after his own attorney general, William Barr, rebutted his claims, saying the Department of Justice and FBI “have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”
Here are 19 false or misleading claims the president made during the speech. It is by no means an exhaustive list.
Not ‘overwhelming’ evidence: The president boasted that his legal team has collected “overwhelming” evidence of fraud. “Everyone is saying, ‘Wow, the evidence is overwhelming,’ when they get to see it,” he said. Judges, however, have found the evidence less than overwhelming.
For example, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann criticized the Trump campaign for failing to provide evidence to justify blocking Pennsylvania from certifying its election results. In dismissing the case, Brann said: “One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption.” Brann continued, “Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and
