Republicans and Democrats react to the announcement that Hillary Clinton’s campaign plans to join a vote recount in Wisconsin initiated by former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)On Sunday morning, President-elect Donald Trump assured us all that a recount of the 2016 election wouldn’t change the outcome and was a waste of resources. In a tweetstorm, he quoted Hillary Clinton:
Trump is going to be our President. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead." So much time and money will be spent – same result! Sad
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
Later Sunday, though, he made a real case that we should have no confidence in those same election results, alleging massive voter fraud:
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2016
Trump was doing this to make the case that he didn’t actually lose the popular vote, which has become a Democratic rallying cry following Clinton’s loss. It’s clearly a sore spot for Trump.
But the president-elect is also, unwittingly and amazingly, calling into question the results of an election that he won nearly three weeks ago. The logical extension of his argument is that all results should not be trusted. In effect, Trump is lending credence to the very same recount effort that he criticized as superfluous.
A caveat on all of this: There is absolutely no evidence of Trump’s alleged large-scale voter fraud. And even Clinton’s campaign, while joining in recount efforts initiated by Green Party nominee Jill Stein, has acknowledged as much. So I am not saying that there is suddenly a real reason to doubt the fact that Trump won the 2016 election.
https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/803053552373473284?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
What I am saying is that, if the system was susceptible to the kind of pro-Clinton fraud that Trump is alleging, who is to say that it wasn’t also susceptible to manipulation that might have benefited Trump? Trump’s argument is that our electoral system was vulnerable to all kinds of shenanigans that could have changed the results in specific states. Why not shenanigans instigated by Russia, which experts say aided Trump during the campaign with fake-news propaganda? Or something else? There is also no evidence of this, but apparently evidence is not required for our next president to make a charge.
Trump is alleging that these shenanigans (yes, I said it again) accrued to Clinton’s benefit, but if our system has so many holes in it, why couldn’t those holes have helped Trump in the states that mattered? If illegal immigrants can vote and there was real voter fraud in states such as California, New Hampshire and Virginia, why couldn’t these things have happened in circumstances and places that didn’t hurt Trump? Why not in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Trump won the presidency by a margin of about a point or less? If the system is that shoddy, it’s probably shoddy everywhere.
Trump is saying that something happened — on a large scale. He’s basing this on dubious Internet sources, but he’s raising doubts about results of an election that made him the president-elect. It’s hard to argue, from that point, that it’s not worth examining just how many real irregularities there are and whether they all just happened to accrue to Clinton’s benefit. This is the president-elect and the soon-to-be leader of the free world, after all, and his words are supposed to carry weight.
This is just Trump being Trump, of course. He is the president-elect, yes, but he’s also a bona fide conspiracy theorist. (Remember how Ted Cruz’s dad might have been involved in JFK’s assassination?) We can no longer dismiss his fomenting of these baseless theories as some political ploy; it’s who he is. And he’s willing to call into question anything that doesn’t show him to be the clear winner. Given that he will lose the popular vote by as much as two full points, he’s in desperate search of an excuse for this fact.
