Six times Donald Trump lied about Philly or Pennsylvania ahead of his rally here on Saturday

Before former President Donald Trump utters a single word at his rally at the Liacouras Center on Saturday, it’s useful to remember that not everything he’s said in, around, and about Philadelphia in recent years has been 100% true.

While it’s not clear whether he’s any more inaccurate speaking here than elsewhere, we’ve nevertheless heard enough misstatements and distortions to create the impression that Trump has a problem with us.

Maybe it’s that in the 2020 election, President Joe Biden received 604,175 votes, or 81%, to Trump’s roughly 18%, or 132,870 votes. And in North Philadelphia, where he’s appearing this weekend, Biden won the vast majority of votes in those wards — between 79% and 95%.

Those numbers appear to be hard for Trump to let go of, as evidenced by his oft-repeated falsehood that the Pennsylvania election was stolen.

Here are six noteworthy falsehoods from the former president about Philly or Pennsylvania.

Even before that 2020 vote, Trump was trash talking the Keystone State. During the October 2020 presidential debate with Biden, the then-president said that “bad things happen in Philadelphia.”

One interpretation has been that Trump was expressing frustration with how Democratic-majority Philadelphia has long been a problem for Republican candidates.

But in an interview Thursday, Pennsylvania State University misinformation expert Matt Jordan said that the “bad things” quote “was clearly a dog whistle about race in Philadelphia.”

“It’s not even that much of a dog whistle,” Jordan continued. “Trump was just referencing race” and how the majority of the city’s people of color vote Democratic.

Trump was campaigning for the 2024 election when he attended the Moms for Liberty summit at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown last June.

There he misinformed again, praising the alleged hate group as being “no hate group” at all: “You are joyful warriors, you are fierce, fierce patriots. You’re not a threat to America.”

The Southern Law Poverty Center differs. It calls Moms for Liberty a “far-right organization that engages in anti-student inclusion activities and self-identifies as part of the modern parental rights movement. The group opposes LGBTQ and racially inclusive school curriculum, and has advocated books bans.”

As it happens, Trump has infrequently visited Philadelphia, except for the rare pop in to sell sneakers, as he did in February.

But that doesn’t mean he avoids using the City of Brotherly Love as a punching bag when convenient.

During a 2020 rally in Allentown, he made the false case that the presidential election of 2012 between then-President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney was somehow fraudulent. Taking the opportunity to bad-mouth Philadelphia again, Trump implied that something suspicious was going down, according to CNN. That’s because, he said, Romney got “almost zero votes” in the city.

In truth, Romney garnered 96,476 votes, 14% of the Philadelphia total, according to CNN.

Later in the same speech, Trump incorrectly stated that then-Gov. Tom Wolf had counted the 2020 presidential election mail ballots in Pennsylvania himself. “This is the guy that’s counting our ballots?” Trump asked. “It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.”

Governors don’t count ballots; county election officials do.

Also at that rally, Trump repeated the misinformation that a Philadelphia judge had ruled in a lawsuit that Trump’s people had been unable to watch the polls during the 2020 election. The judge stated that Trump’s campaign didn’t have the right for poll watchers to observe activities only inside the city’s new satellite election offices, where no votes were being counted.

In one of the odder Trump misstatements, the former president told an audience at the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg in February, “We have to win in November, or we’re not going to have Pennsylvania. They’ll change the name. They’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania.”

Possible interpretations include a guess that Trump was somehow lumping William Penn among historical figures who’ve been “canceled” because of purported misdeeds.

Closer to home, Trump told a crowd in Wildwood last month, without evidence, that Democrats want to pass an abortion law that enables doctors to “execute” newborns.

And a photo circulated by Trump allies said to be of that Wildwood rally was actually the photo of a Rod Stewart concert on a beach in Rio de Janeiro.

Anticipating his Saturday talk in North Philadelphia, Jessica Myrick, a misinformation expert and media studies professor at Penn State, said Trump will likely talk about “violent crime going up, when it’s actually going down.”

“He’ll possibly talk about [fictional movie character] Hannibal Lecter, and also about sharks,” with which Trump is fascinated, Myrick said “And he’ll tell people once again about how the Pennsylvania vote in the 2020 presidential election was rigged, when it wasn’t.”

Myrick concluded, “Trump is very good at telling people the same things over and over, whether they’re true or not.”