It's hard to say where,?????.??????.??????.????.?????? exactly, some of his thoughts are coming from. But one thing is for sure: Donald Trump is lying to himself and to the American public in an extremely dangerous move for an incoming American president.
Hours after venting steam on Twitter at the recount efforts of Jill Stein, Trump dropped this false and baseless tweet:
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As Buzzfeednotes, the most direct source of this completely untrue claim is -- drumroll, please -- a story in Info Wars. And that story itself is based on the tweets of a random person on Twitter with no reputable background of reporting and who refuses to share any data.
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But, regardless of the source, Trump's claim is still garbage.
This new claim is also a continuation of Trump's apparent need to delegitimize the vote totals of an election hewon. If this seems weird, just remember that Trump couldn't bare to have anyone believe Marco Rubio's claim that Trump had a small penis.
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Trump previously dealt with the fact more people voted for Hillary Clinton than for him by talking about how he totally could have won the popular vote if he wanted to. Speaking to the New York Timeslast week, Trump said;
I think it would have been easier because I see every once in awhile somebody says, ‘Well, the popular vote.’ Well, the popular vote would have been a lot easier, but it’s a whole different campaign. I would have been in California, I would have been in Texas, Florida and New York, and we wouldn’t have gone anywhere else. Which is, I mean I’d rather do the popular vote from the standpoint — I’d think we’d do actually as well or better — it’s a whole different campaign.
The exchange was punctuated by Trump saying, "I was never a fan of the Electoral College until now," an admittance that he wouldn't have won otherwise.
It's the same message that Trump tweeted two weeks ago.
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Before the election, Trump crowed about voter fraud even though research had yielded just 31 instances in over 1 billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014. But those calls disappeared once Trump actually won the election and there have been no substantiated claims to back up Trump's (or Info Wars') claims.
(And it's not as if Trump supporters are totally innocent in the handful of reported accusations.)
Instead, Trump is using all his energy scrambling to justify that he's still worthy of the presidency. And he's doing it as much for himself as for the general public. Trump is facing backlash from protesters, the recount effort, and a popular vote lead for Hillary Clinton that has grown since Clinton conceded the election in the wee hours of the morning on Nov. 9.
We saw it in the aftermath of the election in two tweets, both sent from his account, about the protesters. The first slammed the protesters as "professional" who were "incited by the media." But, in his next tweet, posted the next day, he credited the "passion" of what he called a "small group."
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Hours ahead of the previously mentioned interview, Trump spent several tweets blasting the New York Times, calling it "failing," inaccurate, and reveling in reports of complaints against the paper (nothing new for him).
But, hours later at the sit-down with the paper, Trump called the publication "a great, great American jewel" and "a world jewel" while talking about his "tremendous" and "great" respect for a "very special" publication.
Trump was, and still is, twisting things to fit his own narrative, a dangerous precedent when there's no evidence to back him up. Instead of strengthening his position as incoming president, he's allowing his insecurities to not only undermine the results of the election that put him in the White House, but to undermine the presidency itself.