President Donald Trump on Friday issued a bizarre challenge to President-elect Joe Biden when he said that his Democratic rival needed to somehow prove that he didn't win due to voter fraud.
“Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous ‘80,000,000 votes’ were not fraudulently or illegally obtained,” the president said in a tweet, which gave Biden's legal team the difficult logical challenge of proving a negative.
Washington Post reporter Philip Bump, meanwhile, responded to the president's tweet by explaining exactly why it makes perfect sense that Biden received more than 80 million votes in the 2020 election.
"The combination of population growth and high enthusiasm -- largely a function of strong approval of and opposition to Trump -- is why the number of votes cast was so high," he wrote. "As a function of population, though, it wasn’t record-breaking."
Bump then chided the president for giving his supporters false hope that he might somehow still overturn the results of the election.
"Every part of Trump’s tweet about Biden’s votes is nonsense meant to exploit anyone gullible enough to consider him an honest broker," he wrote. "One could argue that Trump has to prove the validity of every single one of his votes in order to remain in the White House, if one wanted to be consistent. But the only votes that matter are the electors anyway."
