President Donald Trump went to Capitol Hill today for his first meeting as President with leaders of Congress. And he brought along with him a riff of “alternative reality” on the 2016 Presidential election. He repeated the completely debunked theory that the votes of illegal immigrants cost him the popular vote (i.e. that it was in effect rigged and he really would have won by a landslide if those non-existent illegal voters had not cast their non-existent illegal votes against him):
In his first meeting with congressional leaders of both parties since taking office, President Donald Trump on Monday reiterated a debunked claim that he only lost the national popular vote because of widespread voter fraud.
Multiple sources described the exchange as part of a generally light-hearted meet-and-greet between Trump and the lawmakers at the White House. It’s unclear if any of the leaders responded to Trump.
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) confirmed that Trump made the voter fraud claim, but added, “I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. I was ready to move onto some policy issues. I didn’t anticipate that discussion.”
It’s further evidence of Trump’s fixation with his narrow victory, in which he captured an Electoral College handily despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. Nearly three weeks after his Election Day victory, as late California returns drove up Clinton’s popular vote margin, Trump tweeted incorrectly about the size of his victory.
“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,” he wrote.
He’s provided no evidence to back up that claim, and multiple fact checks and investigations have called the assertion false.
Trump’s aides did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday evening.
As I’ve noted before, as a former reporter, and as every working journalist can attest, when you can’t get the other side to comment it usually means a)they are trying to come up with spin to answer a story that is not helpful to their candidate or official, or, b)they will not get back to you and comment and hope the story goes away. This is not always the case, but usually the case.
This is a pattern now for Trump. He and his team are…(ahem)..truth challenged. (And this book is worth reading..)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.