President Donald Trump suggested that his party should seize control of elections in ‘at least 15 places’ and brazenly repeated a number of blatant lies about his electoral history in Minnesota and Georgia during a Monday phone interview with a right-wing podcaster who briefly served in a top FBI role last year.
Trump, who continues to falsely insist that he won the 2020 election despite having lost to successor-turned-predecessor Joe Biden by wide margins in both the popular and electoral vote, spoke to podcaster Dan Bongino to mark the return of his eponymous show after serving less than a year as the FBI’s Deputy Director.
At one point during the madcap interview, he began espousing a racist conspiracy theory which posits that Democrats’ opposition to harsh anti-immigration measures is part of a deliberate effort to pack voter rolls with people who are not in the country legally despite the fact that non-citizens are not permitted to vote and almost never attempt to do so.
He claimed that the Biden administration’s reversal of border policies instituted during his first term was meant to bolster the Democratic Party’s fortunes at the polls and argued that Republicans in Congress should respond by taking control of elections in Democratic-run jurisdictions even though the U.S. Constitution specifically allocates that responsibility to state and local governments rather than the federal government.
“People were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally … and it’s … amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say ‘we want to take over,’” he said.
Trump then argued that the GOP “should take over the voting in at least 15 places” and “nationalize” voting in defiance of the constitution because those places “are so crooked.”
The president’s statements were consistent with his history of repeating false claims about elections in places where voters elect Democrats dating back to the immediate aftermath of his 2016 win over Hillary Clinton, when he falsely claimed to have won the popular vote despite only besting Clinton in electoral college totals by winning the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
After he lost those same states to Biden four years later — along with Arizona and Georgia — Trump embarked on a campaign of denial and falsity which led directly to a riotous mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol in a last-ditch effort to prevent Congress from certifying the results. He was later charged criminally for his actions by a federal grand jury in Washington and a state grand jury in Georgia but neither case preceded to trial.
Nevertheless, Trump continued to repeat the same baseless claims to Bongino, telling the podcast host that there are “states that I won that show I didn’t win” and teased that listeners would “see something in Georgia” after FBI agents obtained a warrant to seize ballots from the 2020 race that were counted and recounted three times that year, with each count confirming his loss to Biden there by 11,779 votes.
“You’re going to see some interesting things come in. But you know, like the 2020, election, I won that election by so much,” Trump said.
He also blatantly lied about his electoral history in Minnesota, a state where no Republican has won since Richard Nixon carried the Gopher State in his 49-state romp over George McGovern in 1972.
Trump told Bongino there was “something in the water” in Minnesota, where for weeks residents of Minneapolis have been protesting his administration’s use of roving patrols of masked ICE and Border Patrol agents to round up non-white people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.
Although administration officials claim the massive deployment — which state and local officials have likened to an invasion — is to combat public benefit fraud perpetrated by a number of Somali immigrants there (most of whom are U.S. citizens) — Attorney General Pam Bondi recently offered to end the operation if Minnesota Governor Tim Walz would agree to turn over the state’s voting records to the federal government.
Trump, who has never carried Minnesota’s electoral votes in any of his three campaigns, told Bongino he “won the state three rimes” but “got no credit” because it’s a “rigged state” that is “really rigged badly with the Somalians” even though the number of Somali-Americans living there is fewer than the margin by which he lost the state in 2024, 2020 and 2016.
