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Prematurely, without evidence, and probably days before an election result, Donald Trump has tried to claim victory in the US presidential election and has suggested foul play by the Democrats.
By posting to your Twitter account and Facebook page early Tuesday morning, wrote “Big PROFIT!” closely followed by “We’re in a BIG time, but they’re trying to STEAL the election. We will never let them do it. No votes can be cast after the polls close! “Both Facebook and Twitter have flagged the latest post as misleading, while Facebook has also flagged Trump’s other election night posts (as well as Biden’s) with the reminder that the results are not yet decisive.
These statements by Trump are, of course, something we have been preparing for all year. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, when it became clear that postal ballots would be used more than ever, Trump claimed that these votes would be “substantially fraudulent” (this statement is worth clarifying now and until this mess is over, it is false and without foundation).
It became an even more likely possibility that Trump would claim an early victory after Sunday, when Axios reported that his team was actively preparing to do so if Republicans appeared to be “ahead” on the night. Trump later denied this They claim that since then it has become a reality.
It would be nice to say now that if you lose decisively, it doesn’t really matter what you say. Or maybe it does matter, from a moral and political perspective, but it won’t materially affect the outcome of this particular race. But what we’ve learned from the last four years is what is now a cliché: that facts don’t seem to matter, and truth doesn’t really exist. And while you could say that Trump has been laying the groundwork for this moment for the past few months, the reality is that he has actually been doing it, mostly on Twitter, for more than ten years.
Trump has used social media since the beginning of the Obama years to cast doubt in the minds of, really, everyone in the world. He has campaigned tenaciously and made it his entire brand to make us question the things we have long believed to be true. He has argued that Obama’s birth certificate is fake, that reputable media outlets were simply lying to us, and that his political opponents (on all sides of the spectrum) had done or said things that there is no proof to be true. . He built a popular base for his version of the truth on social media and repeated it on the stump and on television. All of this has meant that, especially in the years in which he has literally been president, narrative always triumphs over truth.
And with that has arrived a new era of reality, one where you spit it out on Twitter and then go out and make it come true once you see that it holds up. As my colleague Emily Tamkin wrote in September, “The biggest threat to American norms in this presidential election is the president himself.” Disinformation abounds, the Supreme Court is his, and Trump has crafted his own compelling version of the world we live in. You have done it so successfully that it is probably enough to make anything to do with the actual result irrelevant. All Trump has to do is convince us that this, his version of the election, is what is really happening.
Trump has already repeated his false claims of Democratic foul play and premature victory in his broadcast statement, made just after 2 a.m. ET today. There he suggested that nearby undeclared states (Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania) were already his and said that the remaining ballots should not be counted, even though the ballot counting occurs for days after every American election. In addition to reiterating this story he’s pushing for, he crucially confirmed the final piece to his electoral strategy puzzle: that he will dispute the outcome in the Supreme Court.
It’s still too early to tell who the next president will be, and it could still be Joe Biden. Most polls predict that this is the most likely outcome. Yet now it will be days, if not weeks, before we have an answer, with plenty of time for many narratives to cling to critical American minds. Whether or not these are his last days, Trump has set a precedent that what you tweet can be sincerely powerful: changing what is socially accepted, what is actually believed, and perhaps even who wins an election.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Trump said in his statement this morning, “we’ve already won it.” It’s hard to look back at this entire presidency and see how it hasn’t.
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