FactChecking Trump’s Interview with Carlson
In lieu of joining his fellow Republican presidential candidates in the Aug. 23 debate, former President Donald Trump granted an interview to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson — who posted it to X minutes before the debate began. Trump made several familiar false and misleading claims.
- Trump continued to insist that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to reject electors from certain states for Joe Biden when Congress counted electoral votes for president. He claimed Pence got “very bad advice,” even though it was the advice of White House lawyers — including then-White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.
- Referring to wind energy, Trump falsely claimed that “windmills … don’t work” and that “most” of them are made in China. Wind turbines do work, and by dollar value, more than half of the parts used in onshore U.S. wind projects are domestically sourced.
- He claimed that former Attorney General Bill Barr “didn’t do an investigation on the election fraud.” Barr authorized U.S. attorneys to investigate fraud in the 2020 presidential election, but he and other top Justice Department officials have said they found no evidence to support many specific allegations.
- Trump falsely claimed that the district attorney who indicted him in Georgia “said basically” that Trump did not “have any right to challenge an election.” She said Trump didn’t “abide by Georgia’s legal process for election challenges.”
- He complained that Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams were not indicted for comments they made after losing elections. But Trump was indicted for what he allegedly did to overturn the 2020 election results — not what he said about his election loss.
- The former president repeated the false claim that the Presidential Records Act “allowed” him to take classified documents after leaving office, and he repeated the misleading claim that Biden had “25 times” more boxes of documents than Trump did.
- Trump continued to make the unsubstantiated claim that countries “all over South America” are “emptying out their prisons” and “emptying