GREEN BAY, Wis.— Donald Trump returned to Wisconsin on Tuesday night for the first time in nearly two years, re-introducing himself to the battleground state with misleading claims about the 2020 election.
“You know we won this state. We won this state by a lot. It came out that we won this,” Trump told the crowd at a rally here.
Trump won Wisconsin in 2016; he did not win it in 2020. Turnout was higher in 2020 than it was four years earlier, so Trump did get more votes than he did in 2016 — but it was over 20,000 votes short of what Joe Biden received.
On Monday, Trump also spread the falsehood in an interview with Milwaukee-based conservative talk radio host Dan O’Donnell.
“We actually did much better than the first time,” he said. “We won it in Wisconsin, as you know, the first time. The second time we did much better, but I guess it was delayed. They found out a lot of wrongdoing. And after the wrongdoing was found, people said, ‘Well, he actually did win.’”
O’Donnell did not offer pushback on the claim.
Trump’s campaign declined to offer additional comment.
A number of Republican Party officials and other candidates have expressed a desire to move on from claims the 2020 election was stolen, even as Trump continues to push the conspiracy theories.
Wisconsin played a central role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Two attorneys who worked for Trump orchestrated a plan that originated in Wisconsin for fake electors to falsify paperwork saying he won the state, according to a lawsuit settlement reached more than three years after the 2020 election. That strategy was replicated in other key battleground states.
Even though Trump continues to re-litigate the past election, top allies have tried to change the subject and look toward November, as opposed to the past election.
Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump — who was recently installed as co-chair of the Republican National Committee — told NBC News that she believes Republicans are leaving 2020 in the “past.”
“I think we are past that. I think that’s in the past,” she said last month when she was asked whether it was the RNC’s position that the 2020 election was not fairly decided. “The past is the past, and unfortunately we had to learn a couple of hard lessons in 2020.”
The Green Bay rally, though, underscored how that message has not yet reached some of Trump’s most intense base voters.
Roughly 90 minutes before Trump took the stage, Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow, who is among the most prominent advocates for the false idea that the 2020 election was stolen, hyped up the crowd by again claiming both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were wrongly decided.
“We all know what happened in Wisconsin in the 2020 election,” he said.
The crowd gave him a huge ovation.
