Trump Is So Stupid He Proved His Own Election Lies False

Trump’s election claims were undercut by Trump-commissioned report: The former president, who is running again in 2024, commissioned a major study of the 2020 election. That study contradicted virtually every 2020 claim by Trump. 

More Trump Self-Created Drama

Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him have been debunked over the last two-and-a-half years.

Now, we have learned that those claims were debunked another time- in a report commissioned by Trump’s own presidential campaign in early 2021. 

Trump paid a group called the Berkeley Research Group for the “Project 2020” report, for $600,000 to Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Prosecutors investigating the January 6 attack have the report, following subpoenas to “some people involved in its crafting,” the Washington Post said. 

Perhaps because it didn’t uphold Trump’s claims, the report was never made public. 

The Washington Post, which obtained the report, reported this week that Trump’s researchers had found only a handful of dead people who had voted in Fulton County in Georgia and 23 people across that state- even though, in Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, he had claimed that 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia. 

The report was dated the day before Trump’s call to Raffensperger, which is part of the election-overturning effort that could lead to criminal charges for Trump in Georgia. That his campaign issued a report days earlier showing the opposite could mean that Trump knew the claims he was making on the call were false. 

The campaign-commissioned report also found that they had “high confidence” that 12 ballots in Clark County, the largest county in Nevada, were cast in the names of the dead, even after Trump’s lawyers had claimed in court filings that the number was over 1,500 for that state. 

The report also found that it could not substantiate any voter fraud in Pennsylvania, concluding that “if fictional voters had been artificially created during the voter registration process, that activity could create detectable discrepancies between characteristics of the 2020 voter population versus those found in the general population.” But no such evidence was found. 

Furthermore, the “dead people” voting may not be fraud, and in fact may have been cases in which a person sent in an absentee ballot or voted early, and then died prior to Election Day. And there’s no indication from the report that those ballots were cast against Trump, rather than for him. There have been a handful of prosecutions in recent years of people who cast votes on behalf of dead relatives, including a Pennsylvania man who voted for Trump on behalf of his long-dead mother.

Trump Was Not Pleased 

At one point in December, per the Post story, a meeting between the authors of the report and Trump’s team “grew tense,” likely because the Trump team realized the report wasn’t going to draw the conclusions they wanted. 

The commissioned report also studied other conspiracy theories, including the idea that there had been voter fraud in nursing homes, but none of that was substantiated. 

“This result was not unexpected,” the report said, according to the Post. “Our analysis of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada concluded that in each state the final tabulated result was mathematically possible given absentee request rates,” the researchers said of the key swing states, all of which went for President Biden after all of them but Nevada voted for Trump in 2016. 

As cited by Forbes, a CNN poll this week of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents found that 63 percent of that cohort believe that President Biden “did not legitimately win the 2020 election,” while of that 63 percent, only 52 percent believe there is “solid evidence’ of fraud in that election. This number has dropped significantly over time. 

“Whether or not respondents thought the election was stolen and there was evidence to prove it was largely split along ideological lines, with moderate Republicans much more likely to say the election results were legitimate—and, if they believed it was stolen, that their belief was based on suspicion only—while more conservative Republicans were more likely to say there’s solid evidence of fraud,” Forbes said in its analysis. 

Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.