Unsurprisingly, ex-President Trump’s weekend remarks at this year’s edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) were full of lies. He repeatedly claimed that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, which is not supported by any meaningful evidence whatsoever. Trump claimed that “dead people are voting” and that middle-of-the-night changes to reported vote totals represented fraud, but there’s just no evidence for these claims of systematic fraud. As in every election, isolated instances of fraud were discovered, but none of these instances came anywhere near the same universe as Trump’s claims that fraud swung the election. Reported vote tallies changed because… authorities were counting the votes! He still refuses to get it.
As CNN explains, Trump also claimed that there were more votes than voters in Detroit and Pennsylvania, which is false — and so glaringly false that it’s clear that Trump just doesn’t care enough to seriously engage with reality.
In Pennsylvania, Trump said, authorities “had hundreds of thousands of more votes than they had people voting,” which is wrong. At one point, the claim emerged after someone paired the number of requested mail-in ballots from the 2020 presidential primary election with a number close to the total mail-in voters in the general election. In another instance, the same claim emerged after a group of Pennsylvania state legislators used incomplete data in a comparison of the numbers of total voters and total ballots cast. The issue is that glaring — and Trump just doesn’t care.
Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election inspired the rioting at the U.S. Capitol last month, where Trump supporters hoped to forcibly stop the formal Congressional certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. While at the Capitol, those rioters also murderously hunted top members of the government like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and then-Vice President Mike Pence, both of whom were on the scene when the Trump supporters breached the building. The violent real-world consequences of Trump’s rhetoric didn’t stop him from pushing it again.
At CPAC, Trump also claimed — among other things — that the Biden administration is bringing refugees into the United States “that nobody knows anything about,” which is simply false. As CNN explained, “Refugees are rigorously vetted; the admissions process includes an interview assessment by US government personnel, medical screening, and various types of background checks, including fingerprint checks.”
Trump also insisted that the “only reason most parents do not have that choice [to send their children back to school] is because Joe Biden sold out America’s children to the teachers unions,” which isn’t reflective of reality. As CNN explains, the administration of local school districts — including on the matter of reopening — isn’t the responsibility of the federal government. Rather, it’s the prerogative of state and local officials. Besides, Biden has clearly established his hope to get children back to school very soon.
The lies went on and on. Trump also claimed that Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador “were refusing” to accept deportations from the United States, which isn’t true. In 2016, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did not formally consider any of those countries to be among those that were actually uncooperative in efforts to deport certain individuals from the United States to their places of origin. Within the Republican Party, there’s clearly a continuing appetite for Trump’s delusion.
