By Bo Erickson
WASHINGTON, May 26 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump has repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him at least 107 times in the last six months, keeping the grievance front and center even as he faces new political risks from the war with Iran and looming midterm elections.
Trump devotes near-daily attention to the issue, a Reuters review of his public events, interviews and online posts found, and his comments often come in waves. One Saturday in April, amid
a fragile ceasefire with Iran, Trump posted allegations about the 2020 election - when he lost to his predecessor Joe Biden - seven times on his Truth Social account.
He has rehashed his claims during at least six meetings with world leaders, two celebrations of professional sports teams and the White House observances of Hanukkah and Christmas. In unscripted remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, he said "people will soon be prosecuted for what they did."
He reiterated his claims of a rigged election at a White House picnic for lawmakers last week and again while speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One.
"If we had Jesus Christ come down and count the votes, I would have won California," Trump said of the reliably Democratic state he lost by 29 percentage points in 2020 and more than 20 percentage points in 2024. "But it's a rigged vote."
Aides and interviewers often shrug off his comments, and critics dismiss them as the musings of a sore loser.
But Trump's relentless focus on 2020 points to a forward-looking strategy aimed at justifying new voting restrictions, reinforcing party loyalty and energizing supporters ahead of November elections that will determine control of Congress, according to two White House officials and two people familiar with the matter who were granted anonymity to speak candidly.
By casting the 2020 election as illegitimate, he is also laying the groundwork to challenge Republican losses and undermine Democrats if they win back power, multiple election experts said.
"He’s not looking back; this is about the midterms," said Alexandra Chandler, an election expert at the nonpartisan advocacy organization, Protect Democracy. "He’s trying to create a fog of disinformation with this. So then if he dials it up further with federal interference, the public will not react as surprised."
In April, despite having kicked off a national redistricting war months earlier, Trump denounced the results of Virginia's election to redraw U.S. congressional district maps as "rigged," without providing evidence of fraud.
“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters," White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement.
REPUBLICAN VOTERS SYMPATHETIC TO FALSE CLAIMS
Trump's rhetoric has gained traction among Republican voters. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in April found that 63% of Republican voters believe Trump's false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, a share that has remained largely unchanged in recent years.
An even bigger share of Republicans - 82% - said they agreed large numbers of fraudulent ballots are cast by non-citizens in U.S. elections.
By comparison, only 9% of Democrats and 21% of independents said they believed Trump lost in 2020 due to wrongdoing, and 18% of Democrats and 38% of independents shared concerns about non-citizens casting fraudulent ballots.
Multiple courts, state officials and prior reviews found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
Even so, Trump last year tapped an election-security czar to re-investigate his 2020 loss. Those fresh probes have turned up no new evidence, Reuters reported in April. Administration officials also sought last year to ban voting machines used in more than half of U.S. states as they brainstormed about how the federal government could take control over state-run elections, Reuters reported last week.
Trump's 2020 rhetoric intensified in December after he sought to pardon Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk who was convicted by the state of tampering with voting machines after that election. He repeated the allegations as he pressed congressional Republicans to pass his Save America Act, which would require proof of citizenship for voting, and again while stepping up attacks on mail-in voting.
Though the U.S. Senate has failed to advance Trump's nationwide voting changes, numerous states have implemented similar proof-of-citizenship requirements and stricter identification requirements. Trump has also signed executive orders trying to limit mail-in voting, but those actions are currently being challenged in court by Democrats.
SOME REPUBLICANS PUSH BACK
In the meantime, Trump has used his 2020 claims to deflect blame for intractable global conflicts and domestic policy disputes.
In December, as the war in Ukraine dragged on despite Trump's 2024 campaign pledge to resolve it in a day, the U.S. president told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that the "rigged" U.S. election allowed for Russia's 2022 invasion. In February, he told families who had lost loved ones in immigration-related crimes that they would be “home with your son, daughter” if the election had not been “rigged.”
The 2020 election has also become a loyalty test for many of Trump's nominees for key federal roles, including judicial picks, who have refused under oath to tell Democratic senators that Biden won. Instead, they say only that Congress certified the election in his favor.
Nevertheless, some Republicans are pushing back.
RightCount, a group of Republicans in battleground states, recently relaunched a campaign to defend the integrity of state-administered elections and counter Trump's efforts to nationalize them.
"All the accusations that have been made have all been refuted, but he doesn't want to listen," said former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, a supporter of Trump and a member of the group.
After losing his Republican primary in Louisiana last week after Trump refused to back him, U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy took aim at the president's election rigging claims in his concession speech. Cassidy drew the president's wrath by supporting his impeachment after the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack by Trump supporters trying to stop the 2020 election certification.
“When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to,” Cassidy said. “But you don’t pout. You don’t whine. You don’t claim the election was stolen.”
(Reporting by Bo Erickson; Additional reporting by Nandita Bose; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Deepa Babington)
