On Monday, Donald Trump, President of the United States, college graduate, and functioning (up for debate) adult...straight up LIED to lawmakers, blaming his loss of the popular vote in last year’s election on illegal immigrants who voted for Hillary Clinton, The New York Times reports. He's made the claim before on Twitter.
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
Trump's press secretary, Sean Spicer, doubled down on the claim Tuesday, saying, "The President does believe that, I think he's stated that before, and stated his concern of voter fraud and people voting illegally during the campaign and continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence people have brought to him." He refused to provide any of the alleged evidence.
During the meeting with members of Congress at the White House where he brought up the alleged illegal votes, Trump also touched on the yuuuge size of his inauguration audience. “It was a huge crowd, a magnificent crowd. I haven’t seen such a crowd as big as this,” Trump reportedly said. The Trump administration has already made a few statements about the inauguration crowd that have been invalidated with legitimate photographic evidence, but okay. I’m just getting lost in all the alternative facts, I guess.
According to NBC News, even Republican senator Lindsey Graham is over Trump’s, for lack of a better term, utter and complete BS. “To continue to suggest that the 2016 election was conducted in a fashion that millions of people voted illegally undermines faith in our democracy," he told reporters. "So I am begging the president, share with us the information you have about this or please stop saying it.”
Sen. Graham, on this one and only thing, you and I agree. Hopefully other Republican and conservative members of Congress will take your lead and, at the very least, start calling Trump out.
Numbers like 2.9 million (oh, yes, that’s the number of popular votes by which he lost) might not seem significant to Donald Trump, whose reported net worth is $3.7 billion (I mean, talk about a man of the people, am I right?!). When you try to erase the existence of these people, much less illegitimately blame these numbers on a marginalized group of individuals, there’s going to be some kickback.
CNN reports that during the meeting, Trump also told Congressional leaders that former President Barack Obama told him, in a letter he left for Trump, that he would consider supporting a health care bill that allowed for “greater access, greater health care assurance to people, greater quality and [brought] costs down.” Democratic Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer told CNN that this is true, but that no new bill fitting that criteria seems to exist.
At the rate he’s going, surely Trump will bring us more news about these topics in the coming days. Thought it will probably be super vague and impossible to decipher. Yay for democracy and transparency of government!