Trump Accidentally Let Slip That He Didn’t Win The 2020 Election During His Otherwise Lie-Filled Arizona Rally

Like a broken clock that’s right twice a day, every now and then Trump tells the truth. It’s usually by accident and it’s rarely on purpose. Sometimes when it happens, it doesn’t seem like he realized he did it. Last month, the former president probably didn’t really mean to call his own voter fraud nonsense “stupid.” And on Saturday night, at his big rally in Arizona, he almost certainly didn’t mean to admit that he lost the 2020 election.

But that’s what he did. In his first rally of 2022, Trump aired the usual litany of lies. He trashed Dr. Anthony Fauci, inspiring the crowd to boo and chant “lock him up.” He spread vaccine misinformation, despite taking credit for the wonder drug his followers won’t take. He once again called the House committee investigating the Capitol riot of Jan. 6 the “unselect committee.” He claimed he won the election he lost by over seven million votes.

But he also…said he lost the election? Trump’s mushy brain is hard to track sometimes, and especially so when he started bragging about all the states he won, like Ohio, Florida, and Iowa. He claimed that he won all the states “having to do with legislature,” which sounded like he was repeating some half-remembered claim someone once tried to explain to him, as he’s wont to do.

But then he kept talking. After pointing out that he won a lot of key states, he added, “The only thing we didn’t win was the election.”

Did he misspeak? Almost certainly. Perhaps he simply meant that others, such as the media, vote counters, states, and the federal government think he didn’t win re-election, because he didn’t. Or perhaps it really was a Freudian slip, and he accidentally said the quiet part loud. Maybe deep down, buried under a thick coat of self-delusion, he knows he lost, and bigly.

Or as journalist Ricardo Brooks put it, “If you wait long enough, he always tells the truth.”

The one-term president and failed blogger also returned to another bizarre boast: Wasn’t the crowd at the Capitol riot that led to multiple deaths and which ended his presidency in disgrace pretty huge?

In any case, we’re only two weeks into 2022 and Trump has already told the truth twice: Last week, he called Republican governors, like Ron DeSantis, who won’t admit they’re vaccinated “gutless.” That’s no lie.