Latest / The Kinzinger Report / He Made It Up | Trump's Census Bureau Caught Manufacturing Voter Fraud — August 21, 2026

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He Made It Up | Trump's Census Bureau Caught Manufacturing Voter Fraud — August 21, 2026 · The Kinzinger Report

• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm Adam Kinzinger, and you're listening to the Kinzinger Report, where I bring you top stories and analysis on current events and the growing threats to our democracy.
• 0:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: After serving over a decade in Congress, I hope you know what's true and what really matters so that we can all work to save this country that we love so much.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, everybody, welcome back, happy Friday.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's the weekend and we need one.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Our top story today of the president got caught manufactured in his own voter fraud.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cool.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Census Bureau just published a report claiming that thousands of non-citizens voted in 2020.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: It has no author, no methodology, and it was built by Trump's own political operatives.
• 0:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: He spent six years looking for voter fraud and when he couldn't find it,
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: He just had people try to make it up.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're also going to get into the Navy moving to strip a black Pearl Harbor Hero's name off an aircraft carrier.
• 1:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: A new congressional report showing Trump's Partons of Cost, Crime Victims $1.7 billion.
• 1:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Republicans tweeting their outrage, outrage over a $40 trillion debt that they just voted to grow.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Do me a favor, like this video, share it with someone and you see it, subscribe.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: You don't want to mess an episode, and you want to be the most informed person in the room.
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: So let's get to it.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we're going to start with the Census Bureau, which spent this week getting turned into a factory for election lies.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Earlier this week, the Bureau published a seven-page report claiming that more than 24,000 non-citizens voted in the 2020 election.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Trump jumped on it immediately, posting that the report proves he won in 2020 and
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: predicting the numbers will quote, explode as more records get processed.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: But here's what Trump didn't mention.
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: The report has no author, which former Bureau officials say is unheard of for an agency built on layers of review.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't explain its methodology and according to the report from NPR and CNN, it wasn't produced by the Bureau's career statisticians at all.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: It came from a partisan analyst, the administration installed from the American First Policy Institute,
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: by Trump's own former officials.
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: The experts who work with this stuff every day are being pretty blunt about it.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: David Becker, one of the country's leading election lawyers, put it this way.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: This analysis is laughable.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: Since his data cannot reliably be matched to voter data,
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: And even if you took the report at face value, 24,000 votes out of 128 million is about 200 of 1%.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Even Republicans aren't buying it.
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: George's Republican Secretary of State, Raffinsberger ran an intensive audit in 2024, and found fewer than a dozen non-citizens who had ever voted in this state.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: This report claims George had 420-20 alone, so this week, Raffinsberger wrote to the
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Nevada's a good example of what happens when these numbers actually get checked.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Last month, Homeland Security claimed nearly 16,000 non-citizens were registered vote there.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: This week on a recorded call with state election officials, DHS' own staff admitted they had confirmed just 185 potential non-citizens and hadn't even reviewed more than 14,000 names on their list.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is the playboy.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: You announce a giant number, stamp a federal seal on it, and nobody reads the fine print.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: The 2030 census depends on every American trust in this agency, and this president is burying that is burning that trust to prop up a six year line.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Meanwhile, the Navy is preparing to erase a hero right off the side of an aircraft carrier.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: CNN reports that the Navy has worked in to rename the future USS Doris Miller, a carrier under construction right now.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Internally, Navy leadership has reportedly stopped using the name altogether.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: They just call it CBN81.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: In two sources, say there's been conversations about renaming it after Donald Trump, which would make it the first carrier in American history,
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: So who is Doris Miller?
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: He was a sharecropper son from Waco, Texas, who enlisted in 1939.
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: When Mesa Tinden was one of the only jobs that the Navy would give a black man.
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: On December 7, 1941, when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, Miller carried wounded shipmates to safety, then manned an anti-aircraft gun he had never been trained to fire and shot back at the enemy until he ran out of ammo.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Admiral Nimitz personally pinned the navy cross on his chest, two years later Miller was killed in action when a ship was torpedoed in the Pacific.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: In 2020 during Trump's own first term, the Navy announced this carrier would bear his name.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: It would have been the first carrier ever named for an enlisted sailor in the first named for a black American.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now the Navy says it may put Miller's name on a smaller ship and recommend him for the metal of honor instead.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: His family says nobody even told them the carrier was in question.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: They found out the way that you just did.
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: And this isn't the first time the Pentagon is quietly pushed a black military hero out of the frame.
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Remember what happened to the portrait of General Chappy James, the first black, four-star general on American history, I talked about it last night on CNN.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Adam, as a former service member, how are you reacting to this?
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is, this anger's me, and here's the other thing.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Chappy James was a general in the United States Air Force.
• 5:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Chappy James, one of the best fighter pilots to ever exist.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: He actually pulled a gun on Omar Kadafi at the front gate of a US-based in Libya when Kadafi was taking over Libya.
• 5:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: And could I feed that down?
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: This guy is an epic actually a Republican, by the way, he was a Republican, one of the very first things that he accepted was remove his photo from the Pentagon.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now why?
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why would you remove this hero from the Pentagon if not because of his race?
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Think about the contrast here.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Trump has spent his whole life slapping his name on anything he can.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: Doris Miller earned his place on that hall with his own blood.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: And now this Pentagon wants to trade that in for a little flattery.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: A guy who dodged the draft by the way, that's who they are.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now to a new congressional report that puts a price on Trump's
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: House Judiciary Committee, Democrats are releasing a 25-page investigation today, first reported by Scott McFarlane.
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: The finding, Trump's partners have wiped out $1.7 billion in fines and restitution that convicted criminals owed to the people they heard.
• 6:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: When Trump pardon someone, the court ordered debt to their victims' disappears with a conviction.
• 7:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: The report calls it a massive redistribution of wealth and favor of convicted criminals.
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Take Trevor Milton, a former CEO of the Trump Company, Nikola, convicted of defrauding investors.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: A federal judge was about to rule on nearly $700 million in restitution for his victims.
• 7:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: Then came the pardon that money vanished.
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: The report notes that Milton and his wife had donated more than $1.8 million to committees back in Trump's reelection.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: or Jason Jalanis, an admitted fraudster whose victims rode more than $80 million.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Days after his pardon, Jalanis went to court to demand back the $2 million he had already paid those victims, a federal judge threw it out.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the January six rioters, their pardon's erased roughly $3 million they owed for ransacking the capital.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: None of this went through the traditional pardon process because that process is gone.
• 7:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Trump fired the career pardon attorney and handed the office to Ed Martin an ally so extreme that Senate Republicans wouldn't even confirm in him as the U.S. attorney.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: The pardon power exists for mercy in this White House.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a favor for friends, and the people they heard are the ones left paid.
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Speaking of money, nobody's getting back.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Republicans are very concerned about the national debt that they voted to grow.
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: This Wednesday, the debt hit $40 trillion.
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: I talked about the scale of that number, both on my sub-stack and on CNN last night.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: The scary thing to me is that now $40 trillion in debt with much higher interest rates.
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: We had almost zero percent interest rate back then.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Um, nobody's talking about it now.
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, today we are because it crossed 40 trillion dollars for us.
• 8:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: You could eliminate the United States military.
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: The whole US military right now, not spend another dollar on it, eliminate all four and eight.
• 8:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we would still be running deficits among the highest in the last 20 years.
• 8:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's where we are.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: The debt now works out to more than $300,000 for every household in America.
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: So how did Republicans who control every branch of our government respond?
• 9:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, they tweeted, Bill Cassidy, I have so much to say, I'm just not going to Rick Johnson, Ron Johnson, Rick Scott, and plenty more all posted their outrage about Washington spending problem is that they were innocent by standards.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Of course, each post came with a community note, reminding everyone they all floated for Trump's big beautiful bill, which is projected to add almost $5 trillion to deficits over the next decade.
• 9:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the administration only has one culprit to blame.
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: the issue that we've had under the Biden administration and what we're still kind of dealing with is that the debt was growing faster than American GDP.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's the problem.
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's something that we're certainly fixing every single day in the Trump administration.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Remember, we've been not get here at a day that
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: We were left with a mess.
• 9:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Biden administration had the highest deficit to GDP in history when we weren't at war or weren't in a recession.
• 10:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: For 2025, we brought it down by more than a percent.
• 10:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Apparently it's all inherited from Biden, that's their line 19 months into his presidency after signing one of the most expensive bills in American history.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Look, both parties built this debt over decades, that's true and I've said it.
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: But Republicans don't get to vote for trillions of new borrowing blame the last guy and then tweet like they just discovered the problem.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right now they are the problem.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: And think about the timing here.
• 10:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's almost like they see the writing on the wall.
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Their days in power are numbered and they're rehearsing the outrage, they'll need when they're back in the minority.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: And finally, another desperate midterm play by the administration leaves American ranchers holding the bill.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: In a truth social post this morning, Trump announced a deal to bring down the price of ground beef.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: He said that for the next 90 days America would let in up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef to be sold at 25% below the current market prices.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the president obsessed with tariffs is suspending his own tariffs to lower prices.
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's almost like he knew who actually pays them all along.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Despite all of his rants about communist Democrats, Trump, now wants to fix the price of a hamburger.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: That is communism, by the way.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's about as communist as it gets.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: For the record, be prices are a real problem.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Ground beef is pushing $7 a pound up more than 50% in five years.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Families are hurting and I get it, but so are our ranchers who are only just recovering after years of drought and brutal costs flooding the market with cheap foreign beef pulls the floor out from under them and this is the second time Trump's done it this year.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe they should stop voting for him just going to throw that out there.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Remember these were his people, they wore the hats, they took the hits on soybeans and cattle and they were told to keep the faith but heat keeps
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, do the math on the 90-day window, run through mid-November!
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hoo!
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right past election day, and then the discount's gone, Trump is turning on some of his most loyal followers to try and score cheap political points, right as voters head to the bull.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's not doing this because he cares about what you pay at the register.
• 12:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's rich, he's fine.
• 12:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's doing this because he's trying to save himself and his party from an embarrassment in November.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: But it's common.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well that's it, it's a show for the 21st of August.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: If this was with your time, and it was, like it, share it with someone and he's to see it, subscribe, because he never wanted to mess an episode.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Have a great weekend.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll see you back on Monday.