Donald Trump, the president-elect who sailed into office not on the tides of a democratic process but on the back of the Electoral College, is now falsely claiming that he won the popular vote, too. But only if you "deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."
Unlike CBS, which struggled to formulate a coherent headline in these difficult times, let's be very clear: This is a lie. Hillary Clinton is currently up in the popular vote by over two million votes. There is no evidence of the kind of widespread voter fraud that Trump is referring to.
As ProPublica, a non-profit news organization, rehashed on Twitter over the weekend, it dispatched over 1,000 people to monitor the vote on Election Day. "We saw no evidence the election was 'rigged' no matter what Stein or Trump say," it tweeted. ProPublica said it solicited tips from 400 journalists and 120,000 citizens nationwide. It had 600 people watch social media for reports of voter fraud and had experts on hand to analyze the endless stream of results. Based on all that, "[w]e saw plenty of problems: Long lines, broken voting machines, incorrect poll books, confusion [about] voter ID laws." But, it added, "we saw no reason to doubt the results."
It seems our very sensitive president-elect has been in a tizzy ever since Green Party candidate Jill Stein stepped forward last week to fund a recount of the results in three key swing states. Over the weekend, the Hillary Clinton campaign announced it would back her effort. And so while you were trying to eat away the pain of this election season over Thanksgiving, Trump went on the offensive and let loose a stream of tweets to criticize the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton, especially, for not accepting the results of the race.
So what gives? Is this some bruised-ego-induced rant? Is it proof of a rather dictatorial taste for sowing confusion and mistrust in our democracy? Is it an attempt to distract us all from this deeply reported and terrifying New York Times story about his many conflicts of interest around the world? Or, is it all that and simply, horrifyingly, this?
Mattie Kahn is a writer whose work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Elle, Vogue, Town & Country, and more. She is the author of Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America's Revolutions.
