President Donald Trump has been repeatedly claiming that widespread fraud marked the recent presidential election, which he claims was “rigged” against him, but there is not and has never been any meaningful evidence supporting this conspiracy theory. One of the president’s own principal pieces of supposed evidence falls apart under slight scrutiny. He has complained that vote tallies have changed as time has passed following Election Day, insisting that the changes are evidence of a late-stage Democratic plot to fabricate votes and steal the election — but these claims are ludicrous. Vote tallies have been changing because valid votes have been getting counted, as takes place after every election.
CNN’s John Avlon tears apart eight of the president’s biggest lies in a new fact-check that he delivered on Wednesday. The president’s lies, Avlon noted, “are about playing to conservative crowds, demonizing Democrats, and dominating the partisan news cycle.” He wants to swamp the truth.
On CNN, Avlon said, in part, as follows:
‘When it comes to claims about mass voter fraud, let’s be clear: Trump supporters, you’re being lied to. Donald Trump has a history of lying loudly, turning baseless accusations into play-to-the-base articles of faith. Now the goal is often to create a fake scandal to distract from a real one, but when the accusation is actually investigated, by Republicans in Congress or the Trump Justice Department, it comes up empty, because there was never anything there.’
Trump’s most infamous lies, as Avlon rehashed, include the claim that the Russia scandal was a “hoax” and the claim that the Russia investigation was some kind of covert operation targeting the Trump campaign. Trump has also claimed that his team caught Barack Obama spying on the Trump campaign — but these claims are unequivocally false. Court-supervised surveillance on ex-Trump associate Carter Page does not equal spying on the Trump campaign — it just doesn’t.
Trump has also previously claimed that mass fraud has plagued U.S. elections — he even claimed, ludicrously, that millions of illegal votes had been cast during the 2016 election, when he lost the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton despite his electoral college victory. No evidence has ever emerged that even remotely supports Trump’s claim of millions of illegal votes. It’s pie-in-the-sky lunacy. Trump’s lies, of course, go back before he even ran for president. He was one of the most prominent backers of the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama might not have been born in the United States, a claim that never had any meaningful backing whatsoever.
Watch Avlon’s new fact-check below:
