President-elect Donald Trump has clearly regained his Twitter privileges. The newly elected commander-in-chief has been awfully busy on the social media service today, kicking things off with an irritated series of tweets slamming the swing state recount efforts of Jill Stein. Next up on Trump’s list of complaints? The results of the popular vote.
This afternoon, Trump appeared to stew over the results of the election. It’s not that he’s unhappy he’s president, but instead he felt the need to insist that he would have won the popular vote. Hillary Clinton currently holds a 2.2 million vote lead million vote lead in that category, an advantage that Trump is claiming is false. Why? He believes that a massive “illegal” vote presence tipped the scales in his opponent’s favor, a notion first floated by none other than conspiratorial nutjob Alex Jones. (Trump also made a point to characterize his Electoral College win as a “landslide” victory.)
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
According to Trump, he would have won the popular vote if he weren’t campaigning nationwide.
It would have been much easier for me to win the so-called popular vote than the Electoral College in that I would only campaign in 3 or 4–
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
states instead of the 15 states that I visited. I would have won even more easily and convincingly (but smaller states are forgotten)!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
The accusation that millions of illegal voters cast a ballot matches up with Trump’s pre-election habit of proclaiming the election to be rigged. Of course, the glaring twist in all this is that Trump is blasting of Stein’s call for a recount in the name of voting integrity while simultaneously claiming a tainted process has produced faulty results. Ultimately, Trump just wants his supporters to doubt that the mainstream media is telling the truth and that he and his ilk are the only people they can trust.