Former President Donald Trump repeated claims that he was the winner of the 2020 presidential election during his tribute to conservative radio icon Rush Limbaugh, who died only hours earlier.
Trump called into Fox News on Wednesday afternoon shortly after Limbaugh’s wife, Kathryn Adams Limbaugh, announced her husband’s death on his radio show. Limbaugh died at the age of 70 after a battle with lung cancer.
During the tribute, the former president retold the story of how he presented Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during his 2020 State of the Union address, days after the radio personality announced his diagnosis. He also discussed how the two of them didn’t know each other well until Trump announced his presidential candidacy.
The conversation then took a turn when the former commander in chief was asked what Limbaugh told him after the election, which he lost to President Biden.
“Rush thought we won, and so do I, by the way,” Trump said. “I think we won substantially. Rush thought we won. He thought it was over at 10:00-10:30 p.m. [on election night]. It was over. And a lot of other people feel that way too, but Rush felt that way strongly. Many people do. Many professionals do. And I don’t think that could have happened to a Democrat. You would’ve had riots going all over the place if that happened to a Democrat. We don’t have the same support at certain levels of the Republican system, but we have a great people as Republicans. But Rush felt we won. And he was quite angry about it.”
After the media projected Biden to be the next president, Trump, along with his campaign, engaged in a monthslong campaign to challenge the results in a handful of battleground states that went for Biden. Their arguments ranged from theories about votes systematic changing from Trump to Biden to erroneous claims that there were more votes than eligible voters. They also argued that state governments changed election laws unconstitutionally.
The Department of Justice and nearly every judge that heard one of the dozens of cases they filed said the amount of voter fraud in the election was not substantial enough to change the outcome.
The theories continued to gain traction from others in the former president’s orbit, including on Capitol Hill, where more than 100 House Republicans and a handful of Senate Republicans chose to vote against the certification of Biden’s victory in certain states. The joint session of Congress was disrupted for hours after a group of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, which ultimately led to a violent and deadly clash between Trump supporters and Capitol Police.
