You would think that if a person had just won a major election and benefitted from the fact that we select our Commander-in-Chief based on the Electoral College instead of the popular vote that they’d be celebrating and not trying to call attention to the tiny little matter of their opponent receiving 784,000 more votes.
But of course, Donald Trump is not your average candidate or person, and the fact that he will possibly lose the popular vote by nearly a million votes is really eating at him, as you can see from this tweet:
If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2016
Six minutes later, we got this from the always shallow and superficial leader of the free world:
The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2016
Now, let’s consider for a moment that Trump had won the popular vote and lost in the Electoral College. What do you suppose he would have been saying on every cable news show and all over social media? He’d be hollering that the election had been “rigged!” to keep him out of power. I would bet every dime I have in my checking account on that one.
And Trump has been incredibly critical of the Electoral College system we use in the United States on numerous occasions in the past. In 2012, he complained about the system when he mistakenly thought GOP candidate Mitt Romney had won the popular vote. Trump called the American process of electing a president a “disaster for a democracy,” and also called for a “revolution” in response to the election results.
Asked about his winning while losing the popular vote, Trump told Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes:
“I hated ― well, you know, I’m not going to change my mind just because I won. But I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.”
“There’s a reason for doing this because it brings all the states into play. Electoral College, and there’s something very good about that. But this is a different system. But I respect it. I do respect the system.”
You freaking won, man! Now shut the hell up and get to work!
Featured Image Via Gage Skidmore for Flickr available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2
This article was originally published by the same author at LiberalAmerica.org