President Donald Trump has lied for more than four years that he won the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden. At a rally in Michigan on Tuesday to mark his first 100 days back in office, Trump added a related lie – wrongly asserting that he served as president during Biden’s term as president.
Trump was musing about how, by serving a second term, he has fulfilled one of the criteria he claimed the media uses to judge whether a president was “great.” After some of his supporters in the crowd began urging him to somehow serve a third term, though the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution says nobody can be elected president more than twice, he said, “Well we actually already served three, but – if you count – but remember – I like the victories; I like the three victories, which we absolutely had – I just don’t like the results of the middle term.”
Trump had two victories, in 2016 and 2024, not “three victories”; he lost in 2020 to Biden. He didn’t serve a “middle term”; Biden was president from early 2021 to early 2025.
Trump has publicly mused about the possibility of finding a way to serve as president after this second term expires, saying in March that “there are methods” for doing so.
This was not his only egregious lie about elections at the Tuesday rally. At the beginning his speech, he correctly said he won Michigan twice, then falsely added, “We actually won it three times.”
Trump won Michigan in 2016 and 2024. He lost Michigan to Biden in 2020, by more than 150,000 votes.
Trump has made numerous false claims on the subject of elections in the first 100 days of his second term – even deceiving about the 2024 election he won. At another point in the Tuesday speech, he falsely asserted that Democrats “tried to cheat on this election.” There is no basis for that claim, either.
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