President Donald Trump spent part of last week trying to project confidence about a political outcome that never actually went his way — leaning into bravado, flexing past “wins,” and speaking as if reality itself could be bent by repetition.
But the performance didn’t hold.
What began as a familiar show of swagger quickly unraveled into a rambling, detail-heavy spiral that left viewers cringing and questioning his grip on the facts.
The backlash intensified after Trump falsely claimed — again — that he had won Minnesota in three presidential elections, but viewers say it wasn’t just the claim itself. It was the way he kept embellishing the story, layering on new details that pushed it further from the basic facts.
The episode unfolded during a roundtable with more than a dozen oil executives, including leaders from Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips, where Trump was taking questions on topics ranging from energy policy to a deadly shooting involving an ICE agent.
When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pressed him on whether the FBI should be sharing evidence with Minnesota officials in an ongoing investigation, Trump veered sharply off course — abandoning the question entirely to launch into a personal attack on state leadership and a sweeping tirade about corruption.
“Well, normally I would, but their crooked officials, I mean Minneapolis and uh, Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed. It’s got an incompetent governor — a fool, I mean he’s a stupid person,” Trump replied.
From there, Trump pivoted to a lengthy and misleading discussion of fraud cases in Minnesota, referencing real prosecutions involving pandemic-era misuse of public funds but conflating them with broad, unsupported claims about immigrant communities and voting behavior.
“Can you imagine you come over with no money and then shortly thereafter you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz the whole thing is ridiculous so they’re very corrupt people it’s a very corrupt state,” Trump claimed.
Then came the claim that dominated reaction to the event — Trump’s insistence that he had actually won Minnesota, despite every official election result showing otherwise.
“I feel that I won Minnesota, I think I won it all three times. Nobody’s won it since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago … it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state and the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID,” Trump said, continuing without pause. “They ought to demand maybe same-day voting … But I won Minnesota three times, and I didn’t get credit for it.”
As Trump continued, he added more details — each one less grounded in reality than the last. “I did so well in that state every time. The people were… they were crying everytime after.”
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Trump’s insistence that he “feels” he won the state, despite never doing so, became the focal point of online reaction, with critics ridiculing the logic and questioning the president’s mental fitness.
One person wrote, “He’s deeply unhinged. And someone should tell him that his “opinion” is irrelevant.”
“This guy is so detached from reality, so aggressive, so powerful, and so unchecked that he’s gonna get us into World War III,” one wrote.
“He’s completely out of his mind. I think we’re just a few days away from drooling,” another comment read.
“Seriously the mental incapacity is pretty f—king clear,” another said.
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Some reactions framed Trump’s remarks as evidence of a deeper detachment from reality rather than a political tactic.
“He needs to be put away in a room where he can live out his imaginary world in privacy,” one commenter wrote. “What a sick man,” wrote another.
Another response focused squarely on shutting down Trump’s false premise.
“You don’t get to ‘feel’ you won things. You do or you don’t, and you didn’t. You lost Minnesota soundly three times in a row.”
Trump went on to describe Minnesota, California and other states as “crooked,” before asserting that he won the 2024 election because it was “too big to rig.”
“The last time i won uh… ’24, the one that just took place, I won because it was too big to rig, you couldn’t rig it, it was too big to rig,” he said, before returning once again to Minnesota. “But I won the state of Minnesota, it’s a corrupt voting system with an incompetent governor.”
The claims directly contradict publicly available election results. Minnesota has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972.
Hillary Clinton carried the state in 2016, defeating Trump by roughly 44,700 votes. President Joe Biden expanded that margin in 2020, winning Minnesota by more than seven percentage points. According to the Minnesota Secretary of State’s website, Democrats Kamala Harris and Tim Walz won the state’s 2024 general election with nearly 51 percent of the vote, while Trump and his running mate JD Vance finished with just under 47 percent.
