Podcaster Joe Rogan pressed former President Donald Trump on Friday about his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
“You’ve said over and over again that you were robbed in 2020,” said Rogan, who hosts the popular and controversial Joe Rogan Experience.
“How do you think you were robbed?” he continued.
Trump tried to pivot.
“Well, what I’d rather do is, we’ll do it another time,” said the Republican, who’s now seeking to retake the White House. “And I would bring in papers that you would not believe. So many different papers. That election was so crooked. It was the most crooked election.”
Rogan tried to extract more specifics:
Rogan: OK, but give me some examples of how.
Trump: Well, let’s start on the top and the easy ones. They were supposed to get legislative approval to do the things they did, and they didn’t get it. In many cases, they didn’t get it.
Rogan: What things?
Trump: Anything.
Rogan: Legislative approval of?
Trump: Like for extensions of the voting, for voting earlier, for this — all different things. By law, they had to get legislative approvals. You don’t have to go any further than that.
Trump’s claim about legislative approvals is seemingly related to an argument from some Republicans that state officials changed certain election procedures in 2020 without proper authorisation. In 2021, the fact-checking site PolitiFact called this a “flawed argument” in a detailed explainer on the legal issues involved.
Speaking to Rogan, Trump went on: “If you take a look at Wisconsin, they virtually admitted that the election was rigged, robbed and stolen. They wouldn’t give access in certain areas to the ballots because the ballots weren’t signed. They weren’t originals. They were — we could go into this stuff. We could go into the ballots, or we could go into the overall.”
In 2021, a nonpartisan audit of Wisconsin’s 2020 election found that although some absentee ballots had only partial witness signatures, the vote was — in the words of a Republivan leader on the state Legislature’s Audit Committee — “largely safe and secure.” Only eight ballots were missing a witness signature altogether, and only three were missing a voter signature.
“Are you going to present this ever?” Rogan asked Trump, to which the Republican responded, “Uh.”
That exchange swiftly made it into social media posts from the Democratic campaign of Trump’s 2024 rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Do you think, like — ” Rogan then started to ask, before Trump cut him off.
“Let me give you just one more,” he said. Trump then asserted that controversy around a laptop owned by Democrat Joe Biden’s son ― and false speculation by intelligence officials that stories about the laptop could be Russian disinformation ― significantly swayed the 2020 election in Biden’s favor.
Rogan’s three-hour conversation with Trump delayed a Michigan rally for the Republican, leaving his supporters waiting in the cold for him to appear.