President Donald Trump was flagged under Twitter’s civic integrity policy for claiming that President-elect Joe Biden “lost the election by hundreds of thousands of legal votes in each of the swing states.”
“How can a country be run by an illegitimate president?” he asked.
How can you give an election to someone who lost the election by hundreds of thousands of legal votes in each of the swing states. How can a country be run by an illegitimate president?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2020
The president’s post is only the latest in a long list of his claims that the November 3 general election was fraudulent, though there is no evidence to support this.
He was also immediately criticized.
Two reasons LAME DUCK DONALD won’t acknowledge he lost.
1. He’s desperately afraid to lose the protection against prosecution the presidency temporarily provided him with.
2. This whole charade gives him an excuse to beg his supporters for $$$ and personally pocket the cash…
— Darlene Lewis (@DarleneLewis100) December 10, 2020
You’ve shown us how a country can be run by an illegitimate president. Very badly!
— Wide Open Spaces (@Icarusvsworld) December 10, 2020
Better question: How did someone who lost the popular vote by 3 million still win in 2016?
— Bee Gutjahr (@pixiemenace) December 10, 2020
“How many times must the recounters count before their count counts as the count?
Yes, and how many times must a losing man lose before he agrees to step down?”
— Eric Williams (@Eric_Williams_1) December 10, 2020
Trump has long described his first election win as a “landslide,” but has failed to note that Biden defeated him by the same electoral margin Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by in 2016. But even that is misleading.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight “found that the percentage of electoral vote won by Trump — 56.9 percent — was well below the historical average, 70.9 percent,” according to a Factcheck.org investigation conducted in 2016.
Factcheck.org continued, noting that “Silver found that Trump’s share of electoral votes ranked 44th out of 54 elections going back to 1804. Before that, he noted, “presidential electors cast two votes each, making it hard to compare them to present-day elections.”
Alan is a writer, editor, and news junkie based in New York.