Fact check: Trump rewrites Wisconsin history in rally filled with false claims

Washington CNN —

Former President Donald Trump made more than two dozen false claims at his Tuesday campaign rally in Racine, Wisconsin, including two significant attempts to rewrite Wisconsin history.

The first was a slightly vaguer than usual version of his familiar lie that he won Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election. He lost the state by 20,682 votes.

The second was a version of a false claim Trump delivered in 2020 and again in 2022: his assertion that he had saved the Wisconsin city of Kenosha from destruction in 2020 when Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, refused to take action to deal with the civil unrest that followed the police shooting of a Black man.

“By the way, you know, Kenosha: I saved Kenosha, do you know that? When I was president. Right? Right? I saved it,” Trump said Tuesday. “Kenosha was — Kenosha was about ready to go down the tubes and the governor wouldn’t move, he just wouldn’t move, and I moved. You know, I’m not supposed to; it’s supposed to be the governor, is supposed to do it, the mayor and the governor.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims that Evers “wouldn’t move” and that Trump was the person who “saved Kenosha” are false, as numerousfact-checkerspointed out when he made similar claims in 2020. Evers, not Trump, deployed the Wisconsin National Guard during the rioting in Kenosha — and Evers first deployed the Guard the day before Trump publicly demanded that Evers do so. In other words, Trump insisted that Evers do something that he was already doing.

Trump has repeatedly made a near-identical false claim about another state, Minnesota, that had a Democratic governor and civil unrest in 2020. Though Trump has asserted that he deployed the National Guard to Minneapolis over the