Donald Trump’s election delusions are getting grander
As President Donald Trump’s days in the White House grow increasingly numbered, his delusions about the 2020 election are growing. By a lot.
“You can lose and that’s acceptable,” Trump said during a rally for Georgia’s Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue on Monday night. “You lose, you lose. You go and you go wherever you’re going and you go and say maybe I’ll do it again sometime or maybe I won’t or I get back to life. But when you win in a landslide and they steal it and it’s rigged, it’s not acceptable.”
Moments later, Trump was back at it. “Over the past few weeks, we’ve demonstrated that we won the election in a landslide. Almost 75 million people voted for me,” he said, to applause from the crowd. “The most of any incumbent president in the history of our country.”
Notice the repetition of the world “landslide” there. Trump has gone from saying he might have won in the days after the race was called to now saying he actually did win in a “landslide.”
Facts disagree with this assessment. Yes, Trump did get more than 74 million votes in the election. But President-elect Joe Biden got 81 million.
Not even Trump is claiming that 7 million votes were somehow wrongly cast. And even if they were, that would only bring the race into a dead heat, not a landslide for Trump.
On the Electoral College front, Trump took 232 electoral votes to Biden’s 306. That’s not a landslide for Biden (although Trump got the exact same number in 2016 and claimed a “massive landslide victory“).
Trump has spent the vast majority of his time post-election insisting he won Georgia. But even if he did (which he didn’t), Biden would still win — 290 to 248. In fact, even if Trump overturned all six states where his campaign is claiming — without proof — wrongdoing, he would win, yes, but not with anything close to a “landslide.”
Of course, neither Trump nor his audiences actually spend any time thinking about the meaning of his words. He just lies — bigger and bigger because, well, he can.
The Point: Judging by the progression of Trump’s election delusions, he will have won the Electoral College 538-0 over Biden in a few weeks’ time.
