Daniel Dale
By Daniel Dale, CNN

Donald Trump sat down Friday with prominent podcast host Joe Rogan for a
conversational interview that ran for nearly three hours � and the former
president delivered his standard bombardment of false claims, at least 32
in all.

Many of those false claims are lies that were debunked months or even years
ago. The claims spanned a variety of topics, including immigration policy,
environmental and energy policy, the legitimacy of the 2020 election,
Trump�s record in office, Vice President Kamala Harris, crowd sizes, and
how schools deal with transgender children.

Here is a fact check of 32 false claims Trump made to Rogan. This is not
intended as a complete list of the inaccurate statements Trump uttered in
the interview; with just over a week to go until Election Day, we were
unable to look into every dubious assertion he made.
Immigration

Migrants and murderers: Trump repeated his frequent false claim that �we
had 13,099 murderers dropped in our country over the last three years.� In
reality, as the Department of Homeland Security and independent experts
have noted, that official figure is about immigrants with homicide
convictions in the US today who entered the country over decades, including
during Trump�s own administration, not over the past three years or under
the Biden administration. You can read more here.
Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump attends a
rally in Coachella, California, on October 12, 2024. The rally was one of
multiple visits to blue states Trump has made during the campaign.

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Square Garden rally

Trump�s border wall: The former president falsely claimed, �You know, I
built 570 miles of wall.� That�s a significant exaggeration; official
government data shows 458 miles were built under Trump � including both
wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace
previous barriers.

Harris� border role: Trump repeated a regular false claim about Harris:
�She was in charge of the border.� She was not and is not; Homeland
Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is the Biden administration official
in charge of border security. In reality, President Joe Biden gave Harris a
more limited immigration-related assignment in 2021, asking her to lead
diplomacy with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an attempt to address
the conditions that prompted their citizens to try to migrate to the United
States.

The number of migrants: Trump claimed that at least �21 million� people
have illegally crossed the border during the Biden administration. Through
September, the country had recorded under 11 million nationwide
�encounters� with migrants during the Biden administration, including
millions who were rapidly expelled from the country; even adding in so-
called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as
being roughly 2 million, there�s no way the total is �21 million.�
Elections, campaigns and crowds

The outcome of the 2020 election: Trump repeated his lie that he won the
2020 election, falsely claiming, �I won that second election so easy.� He
lost, fair and square, to Biden, who beat Trump 306-232 in the Electoral
College and earned over 7 million more votes than Trump.

The legitimacy of the 2020 election: Trump made various specific false
assertions about the 2020 election, claiming it was �crooked�; that his
opponents cheated using the guise of the Covid-19 pandemic; and, vaguely,
that it was marred by �old-fashioned ballot-screwing.� All of this is
baseless.

Polling in 2016: Trump told a story about how, he said, a Washington
Post/ABC News poll of Wisconsin during his 2016 race against Hillary
Clinton showed him �down 17 points the day before the election,� but he
knew it was wrong because of the size of his crowds, and he ended up
winning the state: �I was down 17 points in Wisconsin and I won; it�s
crooked stuff.� This story is false; the poll showing him down 17 the week
of the election came during his 2020 race against Biden, and he lost
Wisconsin that year � though by less than one percentage point.
Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance speaks with Jake
Tapper on "State of the Union."

Related article Vance insists Trump�s �enemy from within� comments weren�t
directed at political rivals

The 2020 election and Wisconsin: Trump falsely claimed, �If you take a look
at Wisconsin, they virtually admitted that the election was rigged, robbed
and stolen.� This did not happen, �virtually� or otherwise; while some
Wisconsin Republicans certainly support Trump�s claim that the election was
rigged and stolen, the state�s elections authorities have not made such
assertions � and as PolitiFact previously reported, even Republican-led
election reviews did not find that Trump won the state.

An election ruling in Virginia: Trump falsely claimed that, just before he
walked in for the Friday interview, there was a ruling in a legal �case
where they found thousands of illegal ballots.� This case did not involve
�illegal ballots�; rather, a judge ruled that Virginia had purged voter
registrations from its rolls too close to Election Day. You can read more
here.

Grocery stores and identification: Calling for strict voter identification
laws, Trump spoke of how identification is required in other circumstances,
saying, �When you go to a grocery store, you give ID.� This was a little
vaguer than his previous declarations that �you need� ID to buy groceries,
but it�s nonsense nonetheless; few grocery shoppers are required to provide
identification unless they are paying by check or buying alcohol, tobacco
or certain medications.

A Carter commission and mail-in ballots: Trump repeated his false claim
that a commission led by former President Jimmy Carter published a report
whose �primary finding was you cannot have mail-in ballots.� Trump added,
�The one thing with Jimmy Carter: He had a very strong commission. It was,
no mail-in ballots.�

Though the commission Carter co-chaired was generally skeptical of mail-in
ballots, calling absentee voting �the largest source of potential voter
fraud,� it did not say, �You cannot have mail-in ballots,� as Trump
claimed. In fact, its report highlighted an example of successful mail-only
elections � noting that Oregon, a state that has been conducting elections
by mail-in voting since the late 1990s, �appears to have avoided
significant fraud in its vote-by-mail elections by introducing safeguards
to protect ballot integrity, including signature verification.�

The report also offered some recommendations for making the use of mail-in
ballots more secure and called for �further research on the pros and cons�
of voting by mail (as well as early voting).

Trump�s Las Vegas crowd size: In his latest exaggeration about crowd sizes,
Trump claimed there were �29,000 people� at his event the night prior. His
rally Thursday night, in Las Vegas, was at an arena with a capacity under
19,000.

Trump�s McDonald�s crowd size: Trump falsely claimed that there were
�28,000 people sitting around� the McDonald�s in Bucks County,
Pennsylvania, where he held a publicity event last weekend in which he
briefly performed some of the duties of an employee (the restaurant was
closed to the public). This is fiction; while videos show there was a
substantial pro-Trump crowd gathered in the vicinity of the restaurant, it
is obvious that it didn�t approach 28,000. A local journalist on the scene,
Tom Sofield, the publisher of Bucks County news outlets, wrote on social
media Tuesday: �There were several thousand excited supporters nearby, but
the figure wasn�t 25,000, as stated by the former president later.�

Harris� schedule: Trump, criticizing Harris� work ethic, falsely claimed
she �took off yesterday� and �took off the day before,� and also that
�she�s going to take off tomorrow or the next day.� Trump is entitled to
argue that Harris isn�t campaigning hard, but she was not �off� or
scheduled to be off any of these days. On Wednesday, she participated in a
CNN town hall in Pennsylvania; on Thursday, she held a rally in Georgia; on
Friday, she held a rally in Texas; on Saturday, she held a rally in
Michigan; on Sunday, she is scheduled to make a series of campaign stops in
Philadelphia.
Foreign policy

Trump and ISIS: Repeating one of his regular false claims, Trump said, �We
defeated ISIS in record time. It was supposed to take years, and we did it
in a matter of weeks.� The ISIS �caliphate� was declared fully liberated
more than two years into Trump�s presidency.

Obama and Kim Jong Un: Trump, touting his relationship with Kim Jong Un,
revived his old false claim that the North Korean leader refused to meet
with Barack Obama when the then-president sought a meeting: �They wouldn�t
meet Obama. He (Obama) tried to meet. They wouldn�t even talk to him about
it.�

There is no evidence that Obama ever sought a meeting with Kim. Independent
experts on North Korea and former Obama officials told CNN in 2019 that the
claim is fictional.
Former President Donald Trump has floated the idea of replacing federal
income taxes with tariffs.