WASHINGTON — Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and his GOP allies are play­ing loose with the facts when it comes to a suc­ces­sor for the late Jus­tice Ruth Bad­er Ginsburg.

Seek­ing to jus­ti­fy a pos­si­ble con­fir­ma­tion vote before the Nov. 3 elec­tion, Trump assert­ed over the week­end that many high court nom­i­na­tions were made in an elec­tion year and “in all cas­es, they went for­ward.” That’s clear­ly not true.

In fact, just one hour after Jus­tice Antonin Scalia’s unex­pect­ed death in Feb­ru­ary 2016, Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Mitch McConnell pub­licly made clear the Sen­ate should not con­firm a suc­ces­sor cho­sen by Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma because of the com­ing elec­tion. That slot ulti­mate­ly went unfilled until after Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump announced a nom­i­nee 11 months later.

Repub­li­can Sen. Ted Cruz on Sun­day also claimed a “con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis” if a replace­ment isn’t con­firmed right away, insist­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial rival Joe Biden has stat­ed he won’t accept the elec­tion results if he los­es. Biden has said he will.

The revi­sion­ist GOP his­to­ry comes fol­low­ing a week of out­right false­hoods, on sub­jects like auto man­u­fac­tur­ing, vot­ing fraud and more. Trump told a North Car­oli­na ral­ly that a con­ver­sa­tion with the Japan­ese prime min­is­ter led to five new car com­pa­nies open­ing in Michi­gan the next day. That didn’t happen.

Biden laid out a broad and large­ly sup­port­ed case that Trump has under­played the sever­i­ty of the pan­dem­ic. But the dev­il was in the details: No, Trump did not call the coro­n­avirus a hoax.

A look:

GINSBURG

TRUMP, on advanc­ing a Supreme Court nom­i­nee in a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year: “This has hap­pened numer­ous times. And every time, there was a nom­i­nee, as you know. There’s been many occa­sions where, frankly, it turned out to be dur­ing a pres­i­den­tial year. … But in all cas­es, they went for­ward.” — remarks Sat­ur­day to reporters.

THE FACTS: A Supreme Court nom­i­na­tion put forth in a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year in fact wasn’t advanced “in all cases.”

After Scalia’s death, Oba­ma nom­i­nat­ed Judge Mer­rick Gar­land in March 2016 to fill his seat. But McConnell, R‑Ky., declined to act on the nom­i­na­tion, declar­ing that the next elect­ed pres­i­dent should fill the vacancy.

Garland’s nom­i­na­tion last­ed 293 days, extend­ing past the Novem­ber 2016 elec­tion that Trump won and expir­ing in Jan­u­ary 2017. As pres­i­dent, Trump sub­se­quent­ly nom­i­nat­ed Neil Gor­such, who won con­fir­ma­tion by the Repub­li­can-con­trolled Senate.

Democ­rats typ­i­cal­ly point to Garland’s exam­ple as a case of Repub­li­can hypocrisy in seek­ing an imme­di­ate replace­ment now for Gins­burg. McConnell has said Trump’s pick — expect­ed to be announced this week — will get a Sen­ate vote but hasn’t indi­cat­ed when.

TED CRUZ: “I think it is par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant that the Sen­ate take it up and con­firm this nom­i­na­tion before the elec­tion. Because Joe Biden has been explic­it. He has said, if he doesn’t win, he’s going to chal­lenge this elec­tion. He’s going to go to court. … Giv­en that, there is a seri­ous risk of a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis.” — inter­view Sun­day on ABC’s “This Week.”

THE FACTS: The Texas sen­a­tor is incorrect.

Unlike Trump, Biden says he will accept the out­come of the Nov. 3 election.

“Sure, the full results. Count every vote,” Biden said Thurs­day at a CNN town hall.

Biden has been assem­bling a team of lawyers in antic­i­pa­tion of court chal­lenges to the elec­tion process and says his legal war room will work to ensure that elec­tions are prop­er­ly admin­is­tered and votes cor­rect­ly counted.

Trump, who fre­quent­ly asserts “rigged elec­tions” and vot­ing fraud despite the lack of evi­dence, has sug­gest­ed he may not accept the elec­tion outcome.

The pres­i­dent told “Fox News Sun­day” in July when asked whether he would accept the results: “I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time, either.”

AUTOS

TRUMP, about for­mer Japan­ese Prime Min­is­ter Shin­zo Abe: “We won Michi­gan — first time in decades. And you know what we’ve done? Many, many car plants are now open­ing up … I said, ‘Shin­zo, please do me a favor, we need more car com­pa­nies. … We want them built here, not in Japan, please.’ He said, ‘But we can­not do that, this is a free enter­prise sys­tem.’ I said, ‘… Please, I need some car com­pa­nies.’ … I said, ‘Shin­zo, you have to do it.’ Next day, it was the sto­ry: ‘Five car com­pa­nies opened up in Michi­gan.’” — North Car­oli­na ral­ly Saturday.

THE FACTS: Trump is mak­ing up the story.

No Japan­ese automak­er assem­bly plants have been announced or built in Michi­gan, let alone in one day, and there are no plans to add any.

There is one man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ty, a joint ven­ture between Gen­er­al Motors and Hon­da, south of Detroit. It’s the $85 mil­lion expan­sion of an exist­ing facil­i­ty to make hydro­gen fuel cells with about 100 new jobs, accord­ing to the Cen­ter for Auto­mo­tive Research, an indus­try think tank in Ann Arbor, Michi­gan. Sub­aru has a new research cen­ter with about 100 new jobs, and Renault-Nis­san-Mit­subishi and Toy­ota have announced expan­sions of research facil­i­ties. These are not new “car plants” run by Japan­ese automakers.

In fact, the num­ber of auto and parts man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs in Michi­gan fell between Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion and Feb­ru­ary of this year, before the coro­n­avirus took hold. When Trump took office there were 174,200 jobs, and that dropped to 171,800 in Feb­ru­ary, accord­ing to Labor Depart­ment sta­tis­tics. In July, the most recent fig­ures avail­able, there were 154,400 auto and parts man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs in Michigan.

That’s far from a car com­pa­ny renais­sance in the state cour­tesy of Japan, as Trump asserts.

PANDEMIC

TRUMP: “If you look at what we’ve done and all of the lives that we’ve saved … this was our pre­dic­tion, that if we do a real­ly good job, we’ll be at about a hun­dred and — 100,000 to 240,000 deaths. And we’re below that sub­stan­tial­ly, and we’ll see what comes out. But that would be if we did the good job. If the not-so-good job was done, you’d be between 1.5 mil­lion — I remem­ber these num­bers so well — and 2.2 mil­lion.” — news con­fer­ence Wednesday.

THE FACTS: He’s gloss­ing over grim num­bers and wrong­ly describ­ing the sci­en­tif­ic projections.

First and most notably, the U.S. is not run­ning “sub­stan­tial­ly” below pro­jec­tions that 100,000 to 240,000 would die from COVID-19. The death toll is about 200,000 and the pan­dem­ic is far from over. Tens of thou­sands of new infec­tions are being report­ed each day.

The White House and fed­er­al pub­lic health author­i­ties have often point­ed to the Insti­tute for Health Met­rics and Eval­u­a­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton as a source for their pan­dem­ic pro­jec­tions. The insti­tute now fore­casts more than 378,000 U.S. deaths from COVID-19 by Jan. 1.

In ear­ly April, U.S. offi­cials esti­mat­ed at least 100,000 would die from the pan­dem­ic even if all con­ceiv­able steps were tak­en against it — a thor­ough and endur­ing lock­down, full use of masks and more. A death toll up to 240,000 assumed aggres­sive mitigation.

Trump has often cit­ed a poten­tial death toll of 2.2 mil­lion or so — a num­ber that puts the real­i­ty of sev­er­al hun­dred thou­sand deaths in a bet­ter light. He uses it to claim to have saved many lives. But such an extreme pro­jec­tion was mere­ly a base­line if noth­ing at all were done to fight the pan­dem­ic. It was nev­er, as he claimed, an expect­ed death toll if “the not-so-good job was done.”

At an April 1 brief­ing, when Trump and his offi­cials dis­cussed the pro­jec­tion of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths, the pres­i­dent held out hope of keep­ing deaths under 100,000. “I think we’re doing bet­ter than that.”

Now he’s try­ing to move the goal posts and have the pub­lic con­sid­er any­thing under 240,000 deaths a success.

TRUMP: “We’ll have man­u­fac­tured at least 100 mil­lion vac­cine dos­es before the end of the year.” — news con­fer­ence Friday.

TRUMP: “We expect to have enough vac­cine for every Amer­i­can by April.” — news con­fer­ence Friday.

THE FACTS: Don’t count on this.

Even if one or more vac­cines is autho­rized for emer­gency use by the end of this year, those num­bers stretch credulity.

Pub­lic author­i­ties are so cer­tain there will be only lim­it­ed dos­es at first that they’re devel­op­ing plans to triage them for peo­ple who need it the most, such as health work­ers. In a dis­tri­b­u­tion plan released this past week, the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Prevention’s best-case option was that 35 mil­lion to 45 mil­lion dos­es would be avail­able by the end of Decem­ber if two of the lead­ing can­di­dates both proved safe and effec­tive. And those can­di­dates require two dos­es, three weeks to four weeks apart.

Hav­ing enough vac­cine for every­one — when­ev­er that may be — is dif­fer­ent from get­ting it into people’s arms. Plans for how to accom­plish that are still being worked out.

Trump is push­ing hard to have a vac­cine announced before the elec­tion or at least to con­vince peo­ple that such an out­come is pos­si­ble. But fed­er­al health offi­cials and sci­en­tists have sig­naled or out­right stat­ed that that is unlikely.

BIDEN VIDEO: “Trump in pub­lic: ‘Hoax.’ Trump in pri­vate: ‘Killer.’” — video tweet­ed by Biden on Tuesday.

BIDEN VIDEO, show­ing Trump say­ing at a Feb. 28 cam­paign ral­ly in South Car­oli­na: “The coro­n­avirus — and this is their new hoax.”

THE FACTS: The accu­sa­tion is mis­lead­ing. So is the selec­tive video edit­ing that made it appear Trump was call­ing the coro­n­avirus a “new hoax.”

At the ral­ly fea­tured in the video, Trump actu­al­ly said the phras­es “the coro­n­avirus” and “this is their new hoax” at sep­a­rate points. Although his mean­ing is dif­fi­cult to dis­cern, the broad­er con­text of his words shows he was rail­ing against Democ­rats for their denun­ci­a­tions of his administration’s coro­n­avirus response.

“Now the Democ­rats are politi­ciz­ing the coro­n­avirus,” he said. “You know that, right? Coro­n­avirus. They’re politi­ciz­ing it.” He mean­dered briefly to the sub­ject of the messy Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry in Iowa, then the Rus­sia inves­ti­ga­tion before return­ing to the pan­dem­ic. “They tried the impeach­ment hoax. … And this is their new hoax.”

Asked at a news con­fer­ence the next day to clar­i­fy his remarks, Trump made clear he was not refer­ring to the coro­n­avirus itself as a hoax.

“No, no, no.” he said. ”‘Hoax’ refer­ring to the action that they take to try and pin this on some­body, because we’ve done such a good job. The hoax is on them, not — I’m not talk­ing about what’s hap­pen­ing here. I’m talk­ing what they’re doing. That’s the hoax.”

He con­tin­ued: “Cer­tain­ly not refer­ring to this. How could any­body refer to this? This is very seri­ous stuff.”

The video’s ref­er­ence to “Trump in pri­vate” call­ing the virus a “killer” comes from the president’s inter­view in April with author and jour­nal­ist Bob Wood­ward, whose new book “Rage” con­tains Trump’s acknowl­edg­ment that he was play­ing down the virus threat in pub­lic, so as to avoid panic.

But it is incor­rect for Biden to sug­gest, as the video does, that Trump insist­ed the virus was a hoax before ulti­mate­ly acknowl­edg­ing to the author in April that it was dead­ly and serious.

Trump on sev­er­al occa­sions before that did refer pub­licly to the virus as a “plague” and a “killer,” while also false­ly dis­miss­ing it as some­thing that would go away on its own, in hot weath­er or otherwise.

VOTING

TRUMP: “A giant SCAM, and the Dems know it!” — tweet Sunday.

TRUMP: “The big Unso­licit­ed Bal­lot States should give it up NOW, before it is too late, and ask peo­ple to go to the Polling Booths and, like always before, VOTE. Oth­er­wise, MAYHEM!!! Solicit­ed Bal­lots (absen­tee) are OK.” — tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: Trump is over­stat­ing the poten­tial for “may­hem” and fraud in “big unso­licit­ed bal­lot states.”

There is no such thing as an “unso­licit­ed” bal­lot. Five states rou­tine­ly send bal­lots to all reg­is­tered vot­ers so they can choose to vote through the mail or in per­son. Four oth­er states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia will be adopt­ing that sys­tem in Novem­ber, as will almost every coun­ty in Mon­tana. Elec­tion offi­cials note that, by reg­is­ter­ing to vote, peo­ple are effec­tive­ly request­ing a bal­lot, so it makes no sense to call the mate­ri­als sent to them “unso­licit­ed.”

More broad­ly speak­ing, vot­er fraud has proved exceed­ing­ly rare. The Bren­nan Cen­ter for Jus­tice in 2017 ranked the risk of bal­lot fraud at 0.00004% to 0.0009%, based on stud­ies of past elections.

In the five states that reg­u­lar­ly send bal­lots to all vot­ers who have reg­is­tered, there have been no major cas­es of fraud or dif­fi­cul­ty count­ing the votes.

TRUMP: “Because of the new and unprece­dent­ed mas­sive amount of unso­licit­ed bal­lots which will be sent to ‘vot­ers’, or wher­ev­er, this year, the Nov 3rd Elec­tion result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED, which is what some want.” — tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: It’s high­ly unlike­ly that any chaos in states with uni­ver­sal mail-in vot­ing will cause the elec­tion result to “nev­er be accu­rate­ly determined.”

The five states that already have such bal­lot­ing have had time to strength­en their sys­tems, while four new states adopt­ing it — Cal­i­for­nia, New Jer­sey, Neva­da and Ver­mont — have not. Of those nine states, only Neva­da is a bat­tle­ground, worth six elec­toral votes and only like­ly to be piv­otal in a nation­al pres­i­den­tial dead­lock. The oth­ers, includ­ing the Dis­trict of Colum­bia, are over­whelm­ing­ly Democratic.

The main states that are being con­test­ed — Ari­zona, Flori­da, Michi­gan, North Car­oli­na, Penn­syl­va­nia and Wis­con­sin — only send mail bal­lots to vot­ers who request them. Trump said Thurs­day that such “solicit­ed” bal­lots are absolute­ly “OK.”

Trump fre­quent­ly blasts mail-in vot­ing as flawed and fraud­u­lent while insist­ing that mail bal­lots in cer­tain states such as Flori­da, a must-win state for him, are fine. But mail-in bal­lots are cast in the same way as what Trump refers to as “absen­tee” mail bal­lots, with the same lev­el of scruti­ny such as sig­na­ture ver­i­fi­ca­tion in many states. In court fil­ings, the Trump cam­paign has acknowl­edged that mail-in and absen­tee bal­lots are legal­ly inter­change­able terms.

States nation­wide expect a surge in mail-in vot­ing due to the coro­n­avirus threat.

TRUMP: “Unso­licit­ed Bal­lots are uncon­trol­lable, total­ly open to ELECTION INTERFERENCE by for­eign coun­tries, and will lead to mas­sive chaos and con­fu­sion!” — tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: Mail-in bal­lots aren’t the biggest risk for for­eign interference.

Try­ing to influ­ence a fed­er­al elec­tion through mail-in bal­lots would prob­a­bly mean pay­ing thou­sands of U.S. cit­i­zens, care­ful­ly select­ed in piv­otal states, who are will­ing to con­spire with a for­eign gov­ern­ment and risk detec­tion and prosecution.

Far eas­i­er and cheap­er would be a social media cam­paign seek­ing to dis­cour­age cer­tain groups of peo­ple from vot­ing, which is some­thing the FBI has warned about. Or a cyber­at­tack on vot­er reg­is­tra­tion data that would elim­i­nate cer­tain vot­ers from the rolls. That could cause hav­oc at polling places or elec­tion offices as offi­cials attempt to count bal­lots from peo­ple who are “miss­ing” from their vot­er databases.

Attor­ney Gen­er­al Bill Barr has raised the pos­si­bil­i­ty that a “for­eign coun­try could print up tens of thou­sands of coun­ter­feit bal­lots.” He argued they would be hard to detect, but that’s been dis­put­ed by elec­tion experts.

Mail-in bal­lots are print­ed on spe­cial paper and must be for­mat­ted cor­rect­ly in order to be processed and count­ed. Bal­lots are spe­cif­ic to each precinct, often with a long list of local races, and would be iden­ti­fied as fraud­u­lent if every­thing didn’t match precisely.

TRUMP: “The Gov­er­nor of Neva­da worked very hard to can­cel all of our venues. Despite the fact that he con­trols the state, he failed, but would have rather done ral­ly out­side. Can you imag­ine this man is in charge … of the Bal­lots in Neva­da!? Not fair, Rigged Elec­tion!” — tweets on Sept 14.

THE FACTS: You don’t have to imag­ine that man being in charge of the elec­tion because he isn’t.

What­ev­er his beef with Nevada’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic Gov. Steve Siso­lak, the gov­er­nor isn’t run­ning the state’s new all-mail elec­tion in Novem­ber. That respon­si­bil­i­ty falls to Nevada’s sec­re­tary of state, Bar­bara Cegavske. She is a Republican.

OBAMA’S NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

TRUMP: “You know, Oba­ma came into office, they gave him the Nobel Prize, like almost imme­di­ate­ly, right? In fact, he didn’t even know why he got it. He didn’t even know. He had no idea why he got it and he was right about that because nobody else does either. They still don’t know.” — ral­ly in Min­den, Neva­da, Sept. 12.

TRUMP: “But it’s true, Oba­ma got it for no rea­son what­so­ev­er.” — ral­ly in Hen­der­son, Neva­da, Sept. 13.

THE FACTS: Nei­ther of Trump’s oft-stat­ed asser­tions about Oba­ma and his Nobel Peace Prize is true. The Nobel com­mit­tee announced Oba­ma as recip­i­ent of the prize on Oct. 9, 2009, near­ly nine months after his inau­gu­ra­tion — that’s not “almost immediately.”

As far as the rea­son for award­ing the prize to Oba­ma, the com­mit­tee was quite clear in its 258-word state­ment issued 11 years ago, which focused on “his extra­or­di­nary efforts to strength­en inter­na­tion­al diplo­ma­cy and coop­er­a­tion between peo­ples” and not­ed in par­tic­u­lar “Obama’s vision of and work for a world with­out nuclear weapons.”

“Only very rarely has a per­son to the same extent as Oba­ma cap­tured the world’s atten­tion and giv­en its peo­ple hope for a bet­ter future,” the com­mit­tee said in its statement.

To be sure, the prize reflect­ed aspi­ra­tions more than accom­plish­ments. When Oba­ma was asked lat­er why he got the prize, he did say: “To be hon­est, I don’t know.” He said they give those prizes “to just about any­body these days.” He was mak­ing self-dep­re­cat­ing jokes, which Trump turned against him at his rally.

But agree or dis­agree with the committee’s deci­sion, it gave its rea­sons for hon­or­ing Obama.

Krish­er report­ed from Detroit. Asso­ci­at­ed Press writ­ers Nicholas Ric­car­di in Den­ver, and Kevin Frek­ing, Lau­ran Neer­gaard, Eric Tuck­er and Dou­glass K. Daniel in Wash­ing­ton con­tributed to this report.

EDITOR’S NOTE — A look at the verac­i­ty of claims by polit­i­cal figures.