Trump Claims He Would Have Done Even Better ‘if the Winner Was Based on Popular Vote’


Donald Trump has found all sorts of reasons to be proud of himself since the FBI and Vladimir Putin colluded to hand him the election despite losing the popular vote by some 3 million votes.

Of course, all his self-congratulatory back-patting is based on lies: He has claimed he not only won the popular vote by a landslide but that he also won the electoral vote by a landslide. Neither is true.

The worst of it is, the more this self-professed “smart guy” thinks, the more entangled his reality gets, which left him tweeting this morning. Even though he didn’t do particularly well, he claimed:


This is more riffing on his claim the other day that Bill Clinton (who did far better than Trump in two presidential elections) doesn’t know how to campaign.

Since Trump won’t admit to Russian hacking or FBI collusion, he is free instead to claim his own genius is responsible for his success.

He followed that up with two further tweets, pushing the same point:

This is an odd claim since he didn’t do particularly well in the election, having lost the popular vote and finished in the bottom third of electoral votes. So it is certainly possible that he could have done better.

The simple fact is that if the election was based on the popular vote, Hillary would have won. He can claim he would have campaigned differently if there were no electoral college but then so would have Hillary Clinton.

His last tweet takes the cake since he promised to run on his own money and ended up spending other peoples’ money instead:

To be fair, Hillary Clinton didn’t have the mainstream media, the FBI, and Vladimir Putin (not to mention a pack of enterprising is unscrupulous Macedonian teens) backing her.

Donald Trump wants you all to think he is as smart as he thinks he is. Demonstrably – and as long as he keeps tweeting this is an endlessly repeatable test – he is not. He campaigned on the myth of his own genius while dwelling on the certainty of defeat.

His reality-changing paradigm got an unexpected 11th-hour reprieve from his buddy Vladimir Putin & Co., but that doesn’t make Donald Trump smart.

It makes him a poster boy for greed and corruption. And in accepting Putin’s bloodless coup against American democracy, it makes him a traitor.