The size of Donald Trump’s election victory has left the president-elect and his allies “insecure,” a columnist wrote Thursday.
And he’s blatantly lying to make sure the country doesn’t see it, the writer added.
MSNBC’s Steve Benen quoted psychologists in an effort to persuade his readers that Trump was desperately trying to trick the electorate into believing he was not as vulnerable as he actually is.
“CNBC published a report noting that psychology experts have identified the techniques successful liars use to get people to believe them,” he wrote.
“It noted that successful liars, for example, make a habit of 'adding details in an attempt to sound convincing.'"
Trump’s continued crowing about the size of a “mandate” handed to him in November proves that point, he wrote.
“'[T]he beauty is that we won by so much,' the Republican boasted. 'The mandate was massive. Somebody had 129 years in terms of the overall mandate. That’s a lot of years.'"
By making such a specific claim — that nobody had won such a strong mandate for 129 years — was designed to make it more convincing, Benen wrote.
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But, he added, it was blatantly — and provably — false.
And the fact that Trump is so desperate to make people believe it shows how vulnerable he feels about the numbers, he added.
“The claim was demonstrably ridiculous: He won a second term fair and square, but he clearly did not win by a margin unseen in 129 years,’” he wrote.
“In terms of the Electoral College, just in recent memory, Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan easily outpaced the 316 electoral votes Trump won this year.”
He added that reports showed the win was neither “unprecedented” nor a “landslide,” as Trump has claimed.
“Trump suggested he was quoting someone else — a common rhetorical game he likes to play, giving him an out when his bogus claim is exposed as false,” Benen wrote.
“This week, he dropped the pretense, publishing an item to his social media platform in which he simply asserted, ‘I won the biggest mandate in 129 years.’
The problem is not just that Trump is peddling made-up, easy-to-disprove nonsense. The problem is made worse by his motivations for doing so.
“The Republican, his team and its allies are apparently feeling a bit insecure about Trump’s underwhelming win — one in which slightly more Americans voted against Trump than for him. The incoming president and his sycophants, meanwhile, want at least to try to claim that he’s the one true voice of the nation and that policymakers have no choice but to obey the American Electoral Colossus.”
He concluded, “Members of Team Trump are lying because the truth is too inconvenient to leave intact.”