‘Wrong!’: Donald Trump trashes Wall Street Journal for fact-checking his exaggerations about the 2020 election

The former president railed against the paper for fact-checking his many claims about the election

For Donald Trump, the 2020 election — and his conspiracy theories about it — has never ended. The former president slammed the Wall Street Journal editorial board on Friday, arguing that the paper was trying to “justify the fraud of an election in Pennsylvania” because it fact-checked one of his letters to the editor.

“The Wall Street Journal just did a white-washed statement, so incorrectly, almost as incorrect as their views on tariff against China, a country that has been ripping off the United States for years (not even including the disaster of the China Virus), trying to justify the fraud of an election in Pennsylvania,” Mr Trump railed in a statement on Friday.

Mr Trump lost the state by more than 80,000 votes, to which the former president responded, “Wrong!” and said the whole election was “wrapped up in large scale fraud or election improprieties.”

As evidence of this “large scale fraud or election improprieties,” Mr Trump pointed to a sheriff in Racine, Wisconsin, who claimed to have found eight cases of voter fraud, in a state where Mr Biden beat Mr Trump by more than 20,000 votes.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Mr Trump warned in the statement before rattling off a litany of allegations of fraud in other toss-up states like Georgia and Arizona that Mr Biden claimed, states that have both undergone extensive vote auditing without turning up anything that would suggest a Trump victory.

In fact, the Republican-led inquiry into Arizona’s vote total, which became a conservative cause célèbre, discovered what it said was an even greater Biden win and no conclusive evidence of fraud.

The dispute stems from a decision from the Journal to publish a letter to the editor from Mr Trump earlier this week, reiterating his baseless claims the election was rigged, then another piece stringently fact-checking its many claims.

“He tosses off enough unsourced numbers in 30 seconds to keep a fact-checker busy for 30 days,” the Journal wrote, blasting what it called the former president’s election “monomania.”

“When one claim is refuted, Mr. Trump is back with two more,” the Journal added.

It argued some of Mr Trump’s claims had no other source beside rumours spouted on cable news, and others were based on what it called “amateur spelunking into voter data.”

The paper was criticised for running Mr Trump’s letter in the first place, given he and his surrogates’ propensities to greatly exaggerate or wholly invent claims of malfeasance about the election, none of which have been meaningfully confirmed in any court of law or official investigation.

“We think it’s news when an ex-President who may run in 2024 wrote what he did, even if (or perhaps especially if) his claims are bananas,” the WSJ concluded.