Former President Donald Trumpwas the star of last Sunday’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas, where he basked in the adulation of his supporters and touched on a variety of pressing issues.
In his fiery speech, Trump repeated "his favorite old lies," making false statements about the trade deficit with China and the legitimacy of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, according to a CNN fact check.
Overwhelmingly, however, the former president focused on spreading disproven conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and lied "over and over" again about the race.
Read Trump’s False Statements Below
At CPAC, Trump repeatedly described the 2020 election as rigged.
"And we were doing so well until the rigged election happened to come along. We were doing really well," he stated at one point in his speech.
As CNN pointed out, there is no evidence that the 2020 presidential race was "rigged" for Democrat Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in what some called an electoral landslide, managing to turn traditionally red states like Georgia blue.
Biden beat Trump by 74 votes in the Electoral College, 306 to 232.
More False Claims
Trump also said in his speech that "this was an election where the person that counts the votes was far more important than the candidate, no matter how many votes that candidate got — and we got record numbers of votes."
This is completely false, according to CNN, given that it was Biden who got a record number of votes — over 81 million. Trump got 74 million votes, a record for a sitting president, but still lost the popular vote by a very large margin.
Drop Boxes, Deleted Votes
In Georgia, Trump claimed, Democrats and their collaborators "deleted" 100,000 votes. Elsewhere, they tampered with ballot drop boxes, which would sometimes be "off very late," according to the former president.
None of this is true, according to CNN‘s fact check.
GOP Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced in June that more than 100,000 names would be deleted from Georgia’s voter registration rolls to keep the state’s voter files "up to date," but this didn’t "delete" Trump voters.
As for ballot drop boxes, there is no evidence they were delivered late.
Trump Lies
According to The Washington Post‘s fact checker team, Trump made a total of 30,573 false or misleading claims over the course of his presidency.
Most Republican voters share Trump’s opinion about the 2020 election, polling shows. For instance, a Monmouth University pollreleased last month found that a strong majority of Republican and Republican-leaning voters — 63 percent of them — believe Trump lost due to widespread irregularities and fraud.
The same survey found that GOP voters view voter fraud as a major issue and consider it a bigger problem than disenfranchisement.
