Again, Haslam and his co-authors quoted Trump speaking at his Jan. 6 rally:

Together, we will drain the Washington swamp, and we will clean up the corruption in our nation’s capital. We have done a big job on it, but you think it’s easy. It’s a dirty business. It’s a dirty business. You have a lot of bad people out there.

Critically, the 12 scholars wrote, Trump “did not provide them with explicit instructions as to what to do,” noting that “he didn’t tell anyone to storm the barricades, to invade the speaker’s office or to assault police and security guards.” Instead, he “invoked values of strength, determination and a willingness to fight for justice (using the word “fight” 20 times) without indicating who they should fight or how,” setting a goal for his followers “to ensure that the election results were not certified and thereby to ‘stop the steal’ without specifying how that goal should be achieved.”

For Trump supporters, they continued,

far from being a day of shame and infamy, this was a day of vindication, empowerment and glory. The reason for this was that they had been able to play a meaningful role in enacting a shared social identity and to do so in ways that allowed them to translate their leader’s stirring analysis and vision into material reality.

Leaders gain influence, Haslam and his collaborators argued,

by defining parameters of action in ways that frame the agency of their followers but leave space for creativity in how collective goals are accomplished. Followers in turn exhibit their loyalty and attachment to the leader by striving to be effective in advancing these goals, thereby empowering and giving agency to the leader.

In the case of Jan. 6, 2021, they wrote:

Donald Trump’s exhortations to his supporters that they should “fight” to “stop the steal” of the 2020 election was followed by an attack on the United States Capitol. We argue that it is Trump’s willing participation in this mutual process of identity enactment, rather than any instructions contained in his speech, that should be the basis for assessing his influence on, and responsibility for, the assault.

In conclusion, they argued:

it is important to recognize that Trump was no puppet master and that his followers were far more than puppets. Instead, he was the unifier, activator and enabler of his followers during the dark events of Jan. 6, 2021. As such, rather than eclipsing or sublimating their agency, he framed and unleashed it.

The power of Trump’s speech, they contended,

lay in its provision of a “moral” framework that impelled his audience to do work creatively to “stop the steal” — fueling a dynamic which ultimately led to insurrection. The absence of a point at which Trump instructed his supporters to assault Capitol Hill makes the assault on Capitol Hill no less his responsibility. The crimes that followers commit in the name of the group are necessarily crimes of leadership too.

On Jan. 7, 2021, a full 30 hours after the assault on the Capitol began, Trump condemned the assault in videotaped remarks. “I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack on the United States Capitol. Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem,” he said. He added, “To those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

During a CNN town hall in May, however, Trump called Jan. 6 “a beautiful day” and declared that he was “inclined to pardon” many of the rioters.

In a January paper, “Public Opinion Roots of Election Denialism,” Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at M.I.T., argued that Trump has unleashed profoundly antidemocratic forces within not only Republican ranks but also among a segment of independent voters:

The most confirmed Republican denialists believe that large malevolent forces are at work in world events, racial minorities are given too much deference in society and America’s destiny is a Christian one. Among independents, the most confirmed denialists are Christian nationalists who resent what they view as the favored position of racial minorities.

Stewart continues:

The belief that Donald Trump was denied the White House in 2020 because of Democratic Party fraud is arguably the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of the federal government since the Civil War, if not in American history. It is hard to think of a time when nearly two-fifths of Americans seemed honestly to believe that the man in the White House is there because of theft.

It remains unknown whether Trump will be charged in connection with his refusal to abide by all of the legal requirements of democratic electoral competition. Even so, no indictment could capture the enormity of the damage Trump has inflicted on the American body politic with his bad faith, grifting and fundamentally amoral character.

The executive summary of the House Jan. 6 committee’s report documents how then-President Donald Trump was repeatedly warned by those closest to him — Cabinet members, campaign officials and even family members — that claims he had lost his reelection due to fraud were false. But Trump spread those lies anyway.

“This was not him hearing this from Joe Biden’s spokesman on MSNBC,” David Becker, co-author of “The Big Truth,” a book about the damage of Trump’s election lies, said in an interview.

Trump’s lies about his loss in the 2020 presidential election sparked the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and have helped fuel millions of dollars in donations to the Republican former president. Here are details showing he was told the truth about his loss and chose instead to lie about it.

PLANNING THE LIE AHEAD OF TIME

The Jan. 6 committee has made clear that Trump long planned to claim victory, whether he actually won or not. His allies were boasting of how they could try to fool the public to make it seem that he had won reelection. The committee cites correspondence from Tom Fitton of the conservative group Judicial Watch to the White House in October 2020 in which Fitton urges Trump to say after polls close: “We had an election. I won.”

The committee also obtained a recording of Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who told associates the week before the election that “what Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory, right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”

Trump had spent months demonizing mail voting, which swelled in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The then-president also insisted the only way he would lose the election would be by massive voter fraud. When Trump did declare victory early in the morning the day after Election Day, he exploited a quirk in vote counting in which in-person votes, which leaned GOP, were tallied first, putting him temporarily ahead. He demanded that local election officials stop counting outstanding ballots, which leaned Democratic.

“President Trump’s decision to declare victory falsely on election night and, unlawfully, to call for the vote counting to stop, was not a spontaneous decision,” the committee wrote in the executive summary for its report. “It was premeditated.”

LIES ABOUT VOTING MACHINES

By Nov. 7, when those outstanding Democratic votes had been tallied and most news organizations had called the race for Joe Biden, Trump’s own campaign knew he had lost.

“The group that went over there outlined, you know, my belief and chances for success at this point,” his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, testified before the committee. “And then we pegged that at, you know, 5, maybe 10 percent based on recounts.”

Stepien added that Trump believed him: “He was pretty realistic with our viewpoint, in agreement with our viewpoint of kind of the forecast and the uphill climb we thought he had.”

Still, Trump continued to insist he had won. His legal team largely walked away from the case, and was replaced by former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and litigator Sidney Powell, who began to make wild fraud allegations, to the dismay of White House attorneys, who warned Trump they were false.

The president grabbed hold of a development in a rural, conservative county in Michigan, where voting machines had initially undercounted his margin of victory. Human error turned out to be the cause. When the paper ballots were tallied and run back through the machine, they were counted correctly.

Trump knew this, the committee says, because Attorney General William Barr told him so on Dec. 1, 2020. Barr testified that he told the president that the paper ballot tally matched the final results. Yet the next day, Trump said in a speech: “In one Michigan county, as an example, that used Dominion systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Barr and others in the administration kept telling Trump that there was nothing suspicious in Michigan or with Dominion, a major vendor of voting machinery. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen told Trump there were no apparent problems, and even Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, rebutted a wild conspiracy theory about Dominion being connected to hostile foreign governments. But, the committee said, between November 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, Trump tweeted about Dominion nearly three dozen times.

LIES ABOUT DEAD VOTERS, NUMBERS

Trump fanned other conspiracy theories, too, despite being told they were false. He claimed that more than 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia, a state he lost by more than 11,000 votes. But Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, corrected him during a Jan. 2 phone call, saying local election officials had researched the question, cross-referencing obituaries and other data.

“The actual number were two,” Raffensperger told the president. “Two. Two people that were dead that voted. So that’s wrong.”

Four days later, during his speech at the Jan. 6 rally before his supporters stormed the Capitol, Trump declared: “Over 10,300 ballots in Georgia were cast by individuals whose names and dates of birth match Georgia residents who died in 2020 and prior to the election.”

Raffensperger also corrected other Trump claims about Georgia, including that 18,325 voters were registered at vacant addresses and that 4,925 voters from out of state cast ballots there. But Trump repeated them in the run-up to Jan. 6 and during his rally.

Trump put out more bad numbers after being told they were false.

“The President then continued, there are ‘more votes than voters,’” Richard Donoghue told the committee of a Dec. 27, 2020, conversation with Trump when Donoghue was the acting deputy attorney general. Donoghue said he told the president that he was comparing 2016 voter registration with 2020 voting numbers, which was inaccurate because more people were registered to vote during Trump’s reelection year. He later specifically warned against using a Pennsylvania number.

But on the ellipse on Jan. 6, Trump declared: “In Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.”

FALSE ATTACKS ON ELECTION WORKERS

Trump also baselessly claimed election workers were committing fraud, despite warnings from his own law enforcement officers that they were doing nothing wrong. Rosen recounted to the committee a Dec. 15 conversation in which Trump asked about a video that purported to show Georgia election workers receiving a suitcase of ballots.

“We said, ‘It wasn’t a suitcase. It was a bin. That’s what they use when counting ballots,’” Rosen recalled. “It’s benign.”

One week later, the report says, Trump declared: “There is even security camera footage from Georgia that shows officials telling poll watchers to leave the room before pulling suitcases of ballots out from under the tables and continuing to count for hours.”

Trump complained about purported misbehavior by election workers in the security camera footage to Raffensperger during the Jan. 2 call. Raffensperger warned the president off the recording.

“I think that’s extremely unfortunate that Rudy Giuliani or his people, they sliced and diced that video and took it out of context,” the secretary of state told Trump.

Raffensperger offered to send Trump a link from a local television station that debunked the lies. “I don’t need a link,” Trump replied.

The next day, he complained that Raffensperger was “unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under the table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters,’ dead voters and more. He has no clue!”

“Yeah. OK,” said Maddow, moments after the former president and Republican 2024 front-runner claimed he’d recently read an article describing his campaign as “one of the finest run” ever.

Maddow then explained her network’s policy — which she was not 100% happy with — when it comes to broadcasting Trump’s falsehood-filled addresses.

“I will say that it is a decision that we revisit constantly in terms of the balance between allowing somebody to knowingly lie on your air about things they’ve lied about before and you can predict they are going to lie about,” she said.

“And so, therefore, it is just irresponsible to allow them to do that,” Maddow continued. “It’s a balance between knowing that that’s irresponsible to broadcast and also knowing that, as the soon-to-be de facto nominee of the Republican Party, this is not only the man who is likely to be the Republican candidate for president, but this is the way he’s running.”

MSNBC colleague Stephanie Ruhle interrupted Maddow to say, “Well, here’s how we balance it. Why don’t we fact-check the hell out of him?”

“Yes,” agreed Maddow. “And we do that after the fact and that is the best remedy that we’ve got.”

But “it does not fix the fact that we broadcast it, honestly,” she added.

Ruhle and the rest of the panel then fact-checked Trump’s false claims on the U.S. economy, oil production and more.

CNN
 — 

Former President Donald Trump made a speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday night after he was arraigned in Manhattan on felony charges of falsifying business records – and delivered a barrage of false claims that have been previously debunked.

Trump pleaded not guilty to all the charges Tuesday.

The former president was repeatedly inaccurate when he pivoted to the subject of the federal investigation into his handling of official documents. He also repeated some of his favorite falsehoods on a variety of other subjects.

Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s claims.

Trump, denouncing the August federal search of Mar-a-Lago, claimed that the Presidential Records Act requires prolonged negotiations over the return of documents.

He said: “Just so everyone knows, I come under what’s known as the Presidential Records Act, which was designed and approved by Congress long ago just for this reason. Under the act, I’m supposed to negotiate with NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration.” He went on to disparage NARA.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. The Presidential Records Act says that, the moment a president leaves office, the National Archives and Records Administration gets custody and control of all presidential records from his administration. Nothing in the law says there should be a negotiation between a former president and NARA over a former president’s return of presidential documents – much less that there should have been a monthslong battle after NARA first contacted Trump’s team in 2021 to try to get some of the records that had not been handed over at the end of his presidency.

Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at NARA, told CNN in an email last week (when we fact-checked a similar false claim by Trump): “The former President is simply wrong as a matter of law. As of noon on January 20, 2021, when President Biden took office, all presidential records of the Trump Administration came into the legal custody of the Archivist of the United States. Full stop. That means no presidential records ever should have been transferred to Mar-a-Lago, and there was no further talking or negotiating to be had.”

Timothy Naftali, a CNN presidential historian, New York University professor and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, described Trump’s claim as “nonsense” and said the former president’s description of the Presidential Records Act is “a matter of fantasy,” concocted to allow Trump to “pretend that he’s a victim.”

The law, Naftali said in an interview last week, makes clear that documents Trump had at Mar-a-Lago are presidential records that legally belong to the public and are legally required to be in NARA’s custody. The law provides “no room for debates and discussions between presidential advisers and the National Archives at the end a presidency” about such records, Naftali said.

You can read a longer fact check here.

George Soros and the district attorney

As he has on social media in the last month, former President Donald Trump invoked liberal billionaire donor George Soros while criticizing District Attorney Alvin Bragg in his speech – claiming that Bragg is a “radical left, George Soros-backed prosecutor.”

Facts First: This needs context. Soros did not make any donations to Bragg’s 2021 election campaign, and a Soros spokesperson, Michael Vachon, told CNN that the two men have never once communicated in any way; there is no evidence that Soros had any role in Bragg’s decision to prosecute Trump. However, Soros, a longtime supporter of Democratic district attorney candidates who favor criminal justice reform, did support Bragg’s election campaign indirectly: he was a major donor to a liberal political action committee, Color of Change PAC, that says it spent just over $500,000 on an independent expenditure effort in support of Bragg’s candidacy.

Vachon told CNN: “Between 2016 and 2022, George Soros personally and Democracy PAC (a PAC to which Mr. Soros has contributed funds) have together contributed roughly $4 million to Color of Change’s PAC, including $1 million in May 2021. None of those funds were earmarked for Alvin Bragg’s campaign. George Soros and Alvin Bragg have never meet in person or spoken by telephone, email, Zoom etc. There has been no contact between the two.”

Soros has been a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories painting the Jewish philanthropist as a puppetmaster behind various US and international events. Color of Change president Rashad Robinson called Trump and his allies’ latest invocations of Soros both “antisemitic” and “anti-Black” he told CNN that the attacks are an overstatement of both Soros’ role in the PAC’s decision-making and the PAC’s role in Bragg’s election victory.

You can read a longer fact check here.

Former presidents’ handling of documents after leaving the White House

Defending his handling of government documents, which is the subject of an ongoing federal investigation, Trump repeated his false claim that that several other former presidents took documents with them upon leaving the White House.

Trump claimed that “openly taking boxes of documents and mostly clothing and other things to my home” is something “which President Obama has done.” He continued, “The Bushes have done. Jimmy Carter’s done. Ronald Reagan is done. Everybody’s done.”

Facts First: This is false, as the National Archives and Records Administration itself pointed out in a statement last year; there is no evidence that previous presidents did anything like what Trump did after the Presidential Records Act took effect in 1981 (beginning with the Reagan administration). In reality, NARA was granted custody of the presidential records of former Presidents Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and both George Bushes as soon as these presidents left office, as required by the Presidential Records Act, and it was NARA, not those presidents, that moved those documents to temporary archival facilities – facilities managed by NARA.

NARA said in an October statement that it gained physical and legal custody of Obama, Reagan, H.W. Bush and W. Bush’s records, as well of those of President Bill Clinton, “when those presidents left office.” It said of the temporary facilities to which the documents were moved: “All such temporary facilities met strict archival and security standards, and have been managed and staffed exclusively by NARA employees. Reports that indicate or imply that those Presidential records were in the possession of the former Presidents or their representatives, after they left office, or that the records were housed in substandard conditions, are false and misleading.”

In other words, there is no equivalence between Trump’s handling of presidential documents and those previous presidents’. In those other cases, the presidential documents were in NARA’s possession and stored securely and professionally. In Trump’s case, the presidential documents found in haphazard amateur storage at Mar-a-Lago, including documents marked classified, were in Trump’s possession despite numerous attempts by both NARA and the Justice Department to get them back.

You can read a longer fact check here.

Trump claimed, as he has in the past, that he is being investigated by Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis over a “perfect” phone call – which he made clear was his January 2, 2021, phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump unsuccessfully urged his fellow Republican to somehow “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election in the state.

Then Trump said, “Nobody found anything wrong with that perfect call until a book promotion tour many months later. All of a sudden, they said, ‘You know, I remember Trump making a call. Let’s look at that.’”

Facts First: The claim that “nobody” found anything wrong with Trump’s call until months later is not even close to true. The Washington Post broke the story of the call the day after it happened, and there was an immediate uproar; on the day the story broke, Kamala Harris, then vice president-elect, called Trump’s comments a “bald-faced, bold abuse of power.” The day after that, some Democratic members of Congress asked the FBI to open an investigation – and Willis issued a statement calling reports about the call “disturbing” and indicated a willingness to investigate. Three days after the call, CNN ran a story headlined “Trump’s call could put the President in jeopardy, legal experts say.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what book tour Trump was talking about, but it’s possible he was referring to Raffensperger’s fall 2021 promotion of his book, “Integrity Counts,” in which he discussed the Trump call at length in interviews with various media outlets. By then, it had been clear for more than eight months that Willis was investigating Trump’s attempts to meddle with the 2020 election in the state.

Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes; on the call, Trump expressed a desire to “find 11,780 votes.”

Trump claimed that the United States has “an economy that has been crippled by the biggest inflation we have seen in more than 60 years.”

Facts First: Trump’s “60 years” claim is an exaggeration, though the inflation rate does remain high by historical standards.

Last June, the year-over-year inflation rate hit its highest level since late 1981, 9.1%. But about 41 years does not round to “60 years,” much less “more than 60 years”. The actual highest year-over-year inflation rate for the last 60 years is 14.8% (in early 1980), far higher than mid-2022 levels. More importantly, year-over-year inflation has now declined for eight straight months, hitting 6% in February 2023 – not even close to the 60-year high.

This Trump claim is an example of how the former president tends to increase his exaggerated figures over time. At a campaign rally in Texas in late March, he claimed – also incorrectly – that the country had the highest inflation in “50 years.”

Early in his speech, Trump repeated one of his familiar lies about the 2020 election he lost. Trump claimed that there were “millions of votes illegally stuffed into ballot boxes, and all caught on government cameras.”

Facts First: This is a lie; there is, again, simply no basis for it. Trump’s more specific previous claims about supposed ballot box-stuffing by election workers in Georgia’s Fulton County have been thoroughly debunked; there is no sign that any such illegality occurred on a large scale. While there was a tiny smattering of voter fraud around the country, some of it committed by Trump supporters, numerous former senior officials from Trump’s administration and 2020 campaign, including the attorney general at the time of the election, William Barr, have acknowledged that there was not sufficient fraud to have changed the outcome.

Trump claimed, as he has before, that the US left behind “$85 billion worth of the best military equipment in the world” when it withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021.

Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of about $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress has appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.

CNN’s decision to give him an unfiltered prime-time platform was a callback to the 2016 campaign, even as the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, persistently interjected to try to cut him off or correct him.

Mr. Trump was so focused on discussing and defending himself that he barely touched on President Biden’s record — which people close to Mr. Trump want him to focus on. But he was disciplined when it came to his chief expected primary rival.

Here are five takeaways.

Trump won’t let go of his lies about 2020 or Jan. 6

If viewers were expecting Mr. Trump to have moved on from his falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him, he demonstrated once again, right out of the gate, that he very much hasn’t.

The first questions asked by Ms. Collins were about Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept his loss in 2020, and his false claims of fraud.

“I think that, when you look at that result and when you look at what happened during that election, unless you’re a very stupid person, you see what happens,” Mr. Trump said, calling the election he lost “rigged.”

Mr. Trump later said he was “inclined” to pardon “many” of the rioters arrested on Jan. 6, 2021, after the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob during certification of President Biden’s Electoral College win. His avoidance of an unequivocal promise pleased people close to him.

He also came armed with a list of his own Twitter posts and statements from that day — an idea that was his, a person familiar with the planning said. He lied about his inaction that day as Ms. Collins pressed him about what he was doing during the hours of violence. And he said he did not owe Vice President Mike Pence, whose life was threatened by the mob, an apology.

As time has worn on, Mr. Trump has increasingly wrapped his arms around what took place at the Capitol and incorporated it into his campaign. Wednesday night was no exception.

“A beautiful day,” he said of Jan. 6.

It was a reminder that embracing the deadly violence of that day — at least for Republicans — is no longer seen as disqualifying. Privately, Mr. Trump’s team said they were happy with how he handled the extensive time spent on the postelection period during the town hall.

The G.O.P. audience stacked the deck, but revealed where the base is

The audience’s regular interruptions on behalf of Mr. Trump were like a laugh track on a sitcom. It built momentum for him in the room — and onscreen for the television audience — and stifled Ms. Collins as she repeatedly tried to interrupt him with facts and correctives.

No matter how vulgar, profane or politically incorrect Mr. Trump was, the Republican crowd in New Hampshire audibly ate up the shtick of the decades-long showman.

He would pardon a “large portion” of Jan. 6 rioters. Applause.

He mocked the detailed accusations of rape from E. Jean Carroll as made up “hanky-panky in a dressing room.” Laughter. No matter that a New York jury held him liable for sexual abuse and defamation this week, awarding Ms. Carroll $5 million in damages.

Calling Ms. Carroll a “wack job.” Applause and laughs.

Flip-flopping on using the debt ceiling for leverage, because “I’m not president.” More laughs.

The cheers revealed the current psyche of the Republican base, which is eager for confrontation: with the press, with Democrats, with anyone standing in the way of Republicans taking power.

It made for tough sledding for Ms. Collins, who was like an athlete playing an away game on hostile turf: She had to battle the crowd and the candidate simultaneously.

“You’re a nasty person,” Mr. Trump said to her at one point, echoing the line he used against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The town-hall format felt like a set piece for Mr. Trump that he leveraged to cast himself as both the putative Republican incumbent — “Mister president,” he was repeatedly addressed as — and the outsider, recreating conditions from his two previous campaigns.

Republicans cheered, but so did Democrats looking to the general election

President Biden’s team had changed the televisions on Air Force One from CNN to MSNBC as he returned from New York on Wednesday evening. But that didn’t mean his political team was not eagerly watching the town hall unfold, and cheering along with the Republican audience.

Mr. Trump defended Jan. 6 as a “beautiful day.” He hailed the overturning of Roe v. Wade as a “great victory.” He wouldn’t say if he hoped Ukraine would win the war against Russia. He talked again about how the rich and famous get their way. “Women let you,” he said. And he refused to rule out reimposing one of the most incendiary and divisive policies of his term in office: purposefully separating families at the border.

Mr. Trump’s answers played well in the hall but could all find their way into Democratic messaging in the next 18 months.

Late Wednesday, the Biden campaign was already figuring out what segments could be turned quickly into digital ads, seeing Mr. Trump staking out positions that would turn off the kind of swing voters that Mr. Biden won in 2020.

Shortly after the event ended, Mr. Biden issued a tweet. “Do you want four more years of that?” it read. It was a request for donations. It was also a reminder how much of the Biden 2024 campaign is likely to be about Mr. Trump.

Trump aggressively dodged taking a stance on a federal abortion ban

Mr. Trump is perhaps the single Republican most responsible for the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year. He appointed three of the court’s justices who powered the majority opinion. But he has privately blamed abortion politics for Republican underperformance in the 2022 midterms and has treaded carefully in the early months of his 2024 run.

Before the town hall, his team spent considerable time honing his answer to a question they knew he would be asked: Would he support a federal ban, and at how many weeks?

His repeated dodges and euphemisms were hard to miss on Wednesday.

“Getting rid of Roe v. Wade was an incredible thing for pro-life,” he began.

That was about as specific as he would get. He said he was “honored to have done what I did” — a line Democrats had quickly flagged as potential fodder for future ads — and that it was a “great victory.”

Mr. Trump’s Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, recently signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, getting to Mr. Trump’s right on an issue that could resonate with evangelical voters. Mr. Trump did not even mention Mr. DeSantis until more than an hour into the event, and only after prodding from a voter. “I think he ought to relax and take it easy and think about the future,” Mr. Trump urged.

In refusing to say if he would sign a federal ban, Mr. Trump tried to cast Democrats as radical and pledged that he supported exemptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. “What I’ll do is negotiate so people are happy,” he said.

“I just want to give you one more chance,” Ms. Collins pressed.

He dodged one final time. “Make a deal that’s going to be good,” he said.

He deepened his legal jeopardy with comments on investigations

The most heated exchange that Mr. Trump had with Ms. Collins was over the special counsel investigation into his possession of hundreds of presidential records, including more than 300 individual classified documents, at his private club, Mar-a-Lago, after he left office.

And it was the area in which he walked himself into the biggest problems.

“I was there and I took what I took and it gets declassified,” said Mr. Trump, who has maintained, despite contradictions from his own former officials, that he had a standing order automatically declassifying documents that left the Oval Office and went to the president’s residence.

“I had every right to do it, I didn’t make a secret of it. You know, the boxes were stationed outside the White House, people were taking pictures of it,” Mr. Trump said, intimating that people were somehow aware that presidential material and classified documents were in them (they were not).

In what will be of great interest to the special counsel, Jack Smith, Mr. Trump would not definitively rule out whether he showed classified material to people, something investigators have queried witnesses about, in particular in connection with a map with sensitive intelligence.

“Not really,” he hedged, adding, “I would have the right to.” At another point he declared, “I have the right to do whatever I want with them.”

He also defended himself for a call he had with Georgia’s secretary of state in which he said he was trying to “find” enough votes to win. “I didn’t ask him to find anything,” Mr. Trump said.

There are few issues that worry the Trump team and the former president as much as the documents investigation, and Mr. Trump wore that on his face and in his words on the stage in New Hampshire.

Donald Trump consistently spread falsehoods, lies and misinformation throughout his town hall hosted by CNN on Wednesday night in front of a crowd of mostly Republican voters in New Hampshire. The former president made false and misleading claims about the 2020 election, the January 6 insurrection, immigration, his border wall, abortion, his sexual abuse trial, the investigation into his handling of classified documents and other subjects.

The host, Kaitlan Collins, attempted to interject and fact-check his claims in real time, though many falsehoods went unchecked as Trump followed his long history of touting baseless conspiracy theories amid his mounting legal troubles.

Here are the Guardian’s fact-checks of some of Trump’s statements.

Claim: Trump started off the night falsely claiming that “millions” of votes were stolen in the 2020 race, and that the election was rigged.

Factcheck: There’s no evidence of widespread fraud, and election officials across the US, including Republican leaders, have repeatedly reaffirmed this over the last two years.

The Trump campaign’s own efforts to show that thousands of ballots cast under the names of deceased people in Georgia came up empty, with findings that contradicted the former president’s claims, a recent report revealed. There is no evidence in any state of fraud or irregularities that affected any election outcomes.

Claim: Trump asserted without evidence that other countries are sending migrants from “mental institutions” into the US.

Factcheck: The former president has repeatedly made this claim, but there is no evidence to support it. Trump’s campaign has been unable to produce evidence of this, CNN recently reported. Anti-immigration groups have also said they are unaware of what Trump may be referencing with these remarks. CNN did a “broad search” for any evidence of this story and came up empty.

Trump also said the US was suffering from “open borders” in his initial remarks on immigration. On the contrary, Joe Biden has maintained many of the policies of the Trump administration, angering immigrant rights groups. The Biden administration also recently announced it was sending 1,500 active-duty troops to the US-Mexico border.

Claim: Trump misleadingly suggested that the judge in the sexual abuse and defamation trial brought by writer E Jean Carroll had prevented him from producing evidence.

Factcheck: Trump has repeatedly made false claims that he was “not allowed to speak or defend” himself. But Trump did not call any witnesses, nor did he make an appearance during the two-week trial, except when excerpts of a video deposition from last year were played in the courtroom.

The judge, Lewis A Kaplan, whom the former president has repeatedly attacked, told Trump’s legal team that he could file a request to testify, but he chose not to. The jury found that the former president sexually abused Carroll, meaning he subjected her to sexual contact with the use of force and without her consent, and ordered him to pay $5m in damages.

Claim: Donald Trump falsely claimed that pro-choice Democrats want to “kill the baby” after they are born, an assertion that went unchecked in the CNN town hall. The former president also suggested abortion rights groups want doctors to be able to “execute” babies.

Factcheck: This false and inflammatory claim was a common refrain of the former president during the last election and has no basis in fact.

Claim: Donald Trump, who as president faced widespread outrage for separating families at the US southern border, defended the policy, saying it had a deterrent effect: “People don’t come.”

Factcheck: There is no clear evidence suggesting that harsh policies such as family separation deter asylum seekers from coming to the US. A 2017 pilot program of family separation was followed by an increase of families entering the US at the border. A 2018 analysis found that the policy was not having the intended effect.

Immigrant rights groups note that policies like detaining children or separating them from their families do not discourage people from coming, and can instead lead to more dangerous journeys.

Claim: Questioned about the continuing criminal investigation into election interference in Georgia, Donald Trump misrepresented a phone call with the state’s top election official, falsely claiming, “I didn’t ask him to find anything.”

Factcheck: A recording of the phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, revealed that Trump had said: “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” The former president said in the town hall that he called to “question” the election. But the recording suggested that he clearly pressured the official to overturn the election results in his favor.