WASHINGTON — Weeks after Donald Trump’s victory to regain the White House, he and his allies continue to call his election “massive” and “historic” and a “landslide” — which is only true if history includes only those elections that involve Donald Trump.
“We’ve made history,” Trump said in his election night speech in Florida, claiming he had been given a “mandate” by voters. “It’s a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this.”
A week later, in a conversation with Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Trump said: “Amazing what happened, we had tremendous success. The most successful in over 100 years, they say.”
Trump’s staff and allies have kept up the drumbeat of boasts.
“President Trump won in dominating and historic fashion,” spokesperson Steven Cheung told The New York Times.
Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokesperson who will be White House press secretary when Trump retakes office, called the win “massive and historic” in a social media post last week.
Those superlatives, though, are only accurate if the dataset includes just the last three elections.
In fact, Trump almost certainly will not exceed 50 percent of the total vote by the time the election is certified next month, meaning a majority of Americans who cast ballots will have voted for someone else. His 1.6-percentage-point margin over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris will be the smallest of any popular vote winner since Richard Nixon’s 0.7 percent win over Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
Further, his Electoral College margin will be smaller than both of Democrat Barack Obama’s wins and both of Democrat Bill Clinton’s victories.
Indeed, the only true historic achievement Trump can claim is that America had previously elected neither a convicted felon nor someone who had earlier attempted a coup to remain in power, and now has done both in the same person.
Leavitt, responding to HuffPost’s query asking what made Trump’s win this month historic, said that Trump had won the popular vote; had received more votes than any previous Republican candidate; had received more electoral votes than any Republican going back nine elections; had won all seven “battleground” states, and had received “record” support among Latino voters.
“Need I continue,” she asked — but then did not respond to follow-up questions other than to insult HuffPost.
But Leavitt’s list of “historic” feats is more of a description of his performance compared to recent Republican candidates than any historical standard. For example, that Trump won the popular vote is unremarkable — the vast majority of presidents have done this.
That he won more raw votes than previous Republican presidents is unsurprising given how much the country’s population has grown in recent decades. Ronald Reagan won 59% of the votes cast in 1984, while Richard Nixon won 61% in 1972, but did so with 54 million and 47 million votes, respectively, compared to Trump’s 77 million.
And while Trump’s share of Latino voters may slightly exceed that won by George W. Bush in his 2004 reelection, it is smaller than that won by every Democratic candidate going back decades.
It is unclear what the point of lying about Trump’s victory margin is.
“He’s the king of hyperbole,” said one Republican National Committee member who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Who knows what the point may be.”
One longtime GOP consultant, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, suggested it might be to help get his Cabinet appointments through. “To enforce discipline on the GOP Senate to approve his nominees,” he said.
Trump, of course, has never been shy about exaggerating his accomplishments. After 2016, he took to calling that victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton “historic” even though he received nearly 3 million fewer votes than she did. In just about every speech, regardless of the occasion, he would recount that election night as the television networks called state after state for Trump. He even began claiming that no Republican had won Wisconsin since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 until he did — which was true only if you disregard Nixon in 1960, 1968 and 1972 and Reagan in 1980 and 1984.
After his 2017 inauguration photos showed he attracted less than half the crowd that Obama did in 2008, Trump nevertheless claimed at a speech at CIA headquarters the following day that there had been 2 million people in attendance, and later that day ordered his press secretary to go out to the White House briefing room and repeat those false claims to the media.
The consultant said Trump’s willingness to lie repeatedly about his achievements, while not effective with everyone, absolutely becomes reality for his followers. “When he does these things, he essentially creates his own weather,” he said. “Most of his supporters know nothing of history. They take what he says at face value and echo that sentiment across every platform.”