In an interview with a St. Paul, Minnesota reporter that aired a few days before his scheduled appearance Friday at the state GOP Lincoln Day fundraising dinner, former President Donald Trump denied saying that he wouldn’t return to the Midwest state if he lost it in 2020—but the local ABC affiliate brought the receipts to prove otherwise.
KSTP reporter Tom Hauser spoke with Trump over a video call conducted Tuesday before the indicted ex-president went to court to hear testimony from his former lawyer, Michael Cohen. Hauser at one point asked Trump about his speaking engagement and whether it should be interpreted as part of a play for Minnesota in November.
“I think at one point you vowed never to come back to Minnesota after you lost the state in 2020,” he recalled. “Is this a signal that you think you have a realistic chance to win the state of Minnesota in 2024?”
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Trump denied saying so.
“Well, I never said I’d never come back. I never even thought of that,” he insisted, before pushing the false claim that he actually won the state four years ago. “I thought I won in 2020—easily.”
In fact, Trump said at a rally that September that he didn’t plan on returning to Minnesota if he lost to Joe Biden—a point that KSTP made by playing that clip.
“If I lose Minnesota, I’m never coming back, I don’t care. I’m never coming back,” Trump told a crowd of supporters in Duluth.
Hauser said that Trump “appeared to be joking.” Whether that’s the case isn’t clear.
Nevertheless, Trump obviously did not win Minnesota, as he claimed, but lost convincingly by seven percentage points, or about 230,000 votes.
Trump’s appearance in the Twin Cities comes on his rare day off from his criminal trial in Manhattan. He spent the first part of the day attending his son Barron’s graduation from Oxbridge Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida.
