Trump’s White House statement: Falsehood upon falsehood
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November 5, 2020 at 7:21 p.m. CST
President Trump’s statement in the White House briefing room on Thursday evening was a litany of falsehoods and grievances, with some baseless conspiracy theories thrown in for good measure. Here’s a quick roundup of Trump’s off-base claims.
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.”
Utterly false. Trump is losing the election, both in the electoral college and significantly in the popular vote. The votes that are still being counted were legally cast on or before Election Day.
But Trump often equates votes for Democrats as illegal. As recently as August, Trump again asserted that he really won the popular vote in the 2016 election if you don’t count the “illegal” votes that were cast.
“A lot of votes came too late. I’ve already decisively won many critical states, including massive victories in Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, to name just a few. We won these and many other victories.”
Again, Trump says that votes that were not counted on Election Day should not count. But some key swing states, such as Pennsylvania, could not start counting mail or absentee ballots until Election Day because of rules set by GOP lawmakers.
“For the first time ever, we lost zero races in the House.”
Republicans lost races in the House. But they have a net gain in seats so far, though not enough to win control of the House.
“I won the largest share of non-White voters of any Republican in 60 years, including historic numbers of Latino, African American, Asian American and Native American voters, the largest ever in our history.”
Exits polls only go back to 1972, but this appears to be false.
While early exit polls — which could change — indicate Trump received 26 percent of the non-White vote, that still would fall short of the 27 percent share that George W. Bush received in 2004.
Trump earned 12 percent of the Black vote, according to early exit polls, which is the same as Bob Dole in 1996 and George H.W. Bush in 1988. Trump’s share of the Hispanic vote also appears to fall short of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.
Asian Americans were not broken out until 1992, but Trump’s share is smaller than in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008.
“We grew our party by 4 million voters, the greatest turnout in Republican Party history.”
Left unsaid is that Democratic nominee Joe Biden got the most votes in U.S. history, and at the time of the news conference, he had nearly 4 million more than Trump.
“Media polling was election interference in the truest sense of that word by powerful special interests. These really phony polls, I have to call them phony polls. Fake polls were designed to keep our voters at home, create the illusion of momentum for Mr. Biden and diminish Republicans’ ability to raise funds.”
This is just a conspiracy theory. Pollsters underestimated the turnout for Trump, but they are not operating at the behest of Democrats. Trump attacked a number of polls by name, including one by The Washington Post, but polls all have a margin of error, and at least one out of every 20 polls comes up with a result that is beyond the margin of error.
“There are now only a few states yet to be decided in the presidential race. The voting apparatus of those states are run in all cases by Democrats.”
The secretary of state in Georgia, a state where Trump has lost considerable ground, is a Republican who supports Trump — and was endorsed by Trump.
“We were winning in all the key locations by a lot, actually, and then our numbers started miraculously getting whittled away in secret.”
As explained, in many states the first votes reported were in-person votes, which leaned Republican (in part because Trump discouraged mail voting by his supporters).
“I predicted that. I’ve been talking about mail-in voting for a long time. It’s really destroyed our system. It’s a corrupt system and it makes people corrupt, even if they aren’t by nature, but they become corrupt. It’s too easy. They want to find out how many votes they need and then they seem to be able to find them.”
Another conspiracy theory. A mountain of evidence shows that mail voting has been almost entirely free of fraud through the decades. Yet according to our database of Trump claims, more than 100 times this year, Trump has peddled false claims or imaginary threats about voting by mail. Election experts say that mail voting is slightly more vulnerable to fraud than voting in person but that both methods are trustworthy because of the safety measures state officials use to verify ballots.
A Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.
“It’s amazing how those mail-in ballots are so one-sided, too.”
This is a direct consequence of Trump’s anti-mail-ballot rhetoric.
“We were up by nearly 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania. I won Pennsylvania by a lot and that gets whittled down to — I think they said now we’re up by 90,000 votes — and they’ll keep coming and coming and coming.”
Trump is right about this, but he acts as if the count on election night was official. It was just a snapshot in time, with an illusionary “red wave” because in-person votes were dominated by Republicans.
“We also had margins of 300,000 in Michigan … and won the state and in Wisconsin, we did likewise fantastically well. And that got whittled down in every case. They got whittled down. Today, we’re on track to win Arizona. We only need to carry, I guess, 55 percent of the remaining vote, 55 percent margins.”
Here, Trump contradicts himself. He complains about losing margins in Wisconsin and Michigan — which have now been called for Biden — but brags about how the votes still being counted in Arizona have cut into Biden’s margins. (That’s because Republicans in Arizona are used to voting by mail.) It’s not clear whether Trump can score a victory in Arizona, but if he does, it’s because of the “illegal” votes he complains about.
“This is a case where they’re trying to steal an election, they’re trying to rig an election, and we can’t let that happen.”
This is simply irresponsible rhetoric. Trump offered no evidence that this is the case, and some of his lawsuits have already been dismissed by courts.
“Democrat officials never believe they could win this election. Honestly, I really believe that. That’s why they did the mail-in ballots where there’s tremendous corruption and fraud going on.”
More conspiracy theory. Democrats actually thought they had a good chance to defeat Trump, given the state of the economy in the midst of a global pandemic. They promoted mail ballots because it appeared safer in a pandemic.
“That’s why they mailed out tens of millions of unsolicited ballots without any verification measures whatsoever.”
Some states send mail ballots to every registered voter, instead of requiring a voter to request a ballot. But state election officials use multiple safeguards to verify that mail ballots are authentic. Most states have bar codes printed on their mail ballots. When a completed ballot arrives, election officials scan the bar code to link it with the corresponding voter in the system. Duplicate ballots from the same voter wouldn’t be counted by the system.
In addition, voters must follow specific instructions to return a ballot received in the mail, such as signing an affidavit. Officials typically compare the signature on the ballot with the one in the registration and may discard ballots with mismatched signatures.
“Our campaign has been denied access to observe any counting in Detroit.”
Trump made a number of claims about the counting in Detroit. This was a response by a reporter who covered it.
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Such a lie about Detroit. I was there. There were literally over 100 observers from each party.
Glenn Kessler has reported on domestic and foreign policy for more than three decades. Send him statements to fact check by emailing him, tweeting at him, or sending him a message on Facebook.Follow
