In a Truth Social post earlier this week, president-elect Donald Trump indicated a misunderstanding of how he was elected president.
Supporters of Trump suggested his post was an attempt to troll Democrats — a purposeful action to deliberately upset them — while his critics said the post may be an indicator of him being cognitively unfit to serve as president.
In the post, Trump suggested that candidates for president must win both the Electoral College and the popular vote in order to obtain the office, when in fact it’s just the Electoral College that matters. He also claimed that Democrats were trying to upend the process because he had won the popular vote this year — the first time he’s been able to do so in his three runs for president.
“The Democrats are fighting hard to get rid of the Popular Vote in future Elections. They want all future Presidential Elections to be based exclusively on the Electoral College!” Trump complained in his post.
Whether he was trolling people or not, it is Trump, not Democrats, who has changed his views on how presidents should be elected.
In 2012, when it appeared that former President Barack Obama was set to win the election through the Electoral College but not the popular vote, Trump commented on Twitter that the “electoral college is a disaster for democracy.” (Obama would go on to win both the Electoral College and the popular vote in that year’s race.)
In 2016, when Trump won the Electoral College but not the popular vote against then-Democratic candidate for president Hillary Clinton, he appeared, at first, to hold a consistent view of the mechanism for selecting presidents, stating in an interview days after his win that he wouldn’t “change [his] mind just because [he] won” the contest.
“I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win,” Trump said.
However, shortly after that interview, Trump did a complete 180, stating that it was more important to win the Electoral College. He spent the next four years defending the Electoral College and rejecting the idea that it should be abolished in favor of a popular vote model — a sentiment he likely adopted because he recognized it was an easier way for him to win election again in the future.
Since that time — at least until his post this week — Trump has held the same view about the supposed superiority of the Electoral College, despite its clear anti-democratic and racist flaws.
Polling shows that voters have a strong desire to get rid of the Electoral College in favor of a popular vote model. According to a Pew Research Center survey published in September, 63 percent of U.S. voters would like the popular vote across the entirety of the country to determine who becomes the president, while a meager 35 percent of voters favor keeping the Electoral College in place.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
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