The former president called the 2020 presidential election, which he definitively lost to Joe Biden, “by far the most corrupt election in the history of our country” and a “hoax,” amplified the baseless conspiracy that “they” used “mail-in ballots to steal an election,” and claimed that an election that saw record turnout was “a third-world country election like we’ve never seen before.”
He said that the 2020 election “will go down as the crime of the century” and praised a partisan vote “audit” in Arizona where Republican state lawmakers have sought to reject ballots from the largest county in the state.
Mr Trump spent months undermining vote-by-mail efforts before any ballots were cast before 2020 elections, fuelling a narrative suggesting that his loss would prove that the results were manipulated. That myth also propelled a pro-Trump riot to attack the US Capitol on 6 January to overturn the results as members of Congress convened to certify them.
His own campaign and attorneys, an elections commission that he disbanded, the Justice Department, FBI and elections officials from both parties across the US have not produced any evidence of widespread voter fraud.