Fact checking Trump’s CPAC speech

On Mar 1, 2021

Most notably, Trump’s first post-presidency address, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, included his usual lies about the 2020 election. He continued to falsely insist he was the legitimate winner and continued to falsely insist the election was “rigged.”

Trump repeated a bunch of other false claims we regularly heard from him as president, on subjects ranging from trade with China to his stance on the war in Iraq. He also offered up some new false claims about President Joe Biden’s early days in office.

We are still going through the transcript of Trump’s remarks, but here is an initial breakdown of some of the things he said.

Who won the election

Trump repeated various versions of his usual lie that he won the 2020 election. He said that Democrats “just lost the White House,” said that “it’s not possible” that he lost, said “no” after asking the rhetorical question “did Biden win?” and said another election win in the future would be his “third.”

Facts First: This is all false. Trump lost the 2020 election, fair and square. Democrat Joe Biden won a 306-232 victory in the Electoral College — earning over seven million more votes than Trump, good for a margin of 51.3% to 46.8%.

Mail-in ballots and dead voters

Trump repeated his attack on mail-in voting and claimed that dead people voted in the election.

“(T)ens of millions of ballots. Where are they coming from? They’re coming from all over the place.” He then claimed that “dead people are voting.”

Facts First: Both of these claims are wrong. As we have fact checked many times before, mail-in voting is not rife with fraud and there were not tens of millions of ballots that came from unknown origins. CNN looked into several claims of dead people’s ballots being cast in the election and found no evidence of widespread fraud.

Early morning vote batches

Trump repeated the claim that some nefarious vote-dumping occurred in the earlier hours of the morning after the election.

“What happened at 3:02 in the morning?” Trump asked the CPAC audience.

Facts First: There’s nothing inherently suspicious or mysterious about large batches of votes being reported late at night or even after Election Day.

Votes from mail-in ballots were often reported later on Election Day and afterwards because they couldn’t be counted ahead of time in many states, including Michigan and Pennsylvania. And in several lawsuits over the election, judges determined the witness affidavits claiming they saw literal late night dumps of ballots were baseless and not evidence of fraud.

More votes than people

Trump repeated another of his arguments about voter fraud, claiming that in multiple cities there were more votes than people. He specifically called out Detroit, Michigan, which came under scrutiny shortly after the election when Republican county election officials tried to block the certification of election results.

“We have a little problem adjusting in Detroit, we seem to have more votes than we have people. A lot more votes. An election changing number,” Trump said.

Facts First: It’s false that there were more votes than people in Detroit. The city saw 250,138 votes cast this election, less…

Fact checking Trump’s CPAC speech

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