Trump's Landslide

I watched most of Trump's Cincinnati rally last night. There was much to be disturbed about. Pre-election warnings about fascism remain relevant; at a minimum we seem to be entering the "Berlusconi" era of American governance. For now, though, I'll confine my remarks to one thing.

During a couple minutes of indecorous, self-aggrandizing chest-thumping, where Trump relived his election-night glory, he said this:

"We won in a landslide; that was a landslide."

I wrote down the quote as he said it, not wanting to get it wrong. I may have mistaken a period for the semicolon in my transcription.

At the moment he uttered those words, current tabulations had Hillary Clinton with 48.1% of the popular vote, whereas Trump received just 46.2%. Not only did Trump not receive a majority of the vote, he did not even receive a plurality. Some landslide. (Other recent presidents not claiming landslides got more than 50% of the popular vote. See table below.)

I am not arguing about who won the election. Trump won it under the rules as constituted. I am saying that a candidate and now president-elect who incessantly makes up his own reality and propagates blatant falsehoods to credulous adoring supporters is a danger to democracy.

In his "landslide" win Trump got 2.56 million less votes than Clinton. (This margin is still slightly fluid.) [Update: Dec 15, 2016 - The margin has grown to 2.85 million; see table below.] In his "landslide" Trump won the Electoral College by the scantest of popular vote margins. Had Clinton won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania as had been expected she would now be president-elect. Trump won those three states by a combined margin of around 100,000 votes. [Update: Dec 15, 2016 - The margin is now less than 78,000; see updates here.]

We might complain that Trump has employed hyperbolic bluster to redefine "landslide" to meaninglessness, but that isn't quite true. What he's doing isn't frittering away meaning; he's redefining reality. It's Orwellian propaganda, in which a clearly false reality is simply asserted from a position of power. Many ignorant or thoughtless people will take it on Trump's say-so, despite it being baldly untrue. Others who understand the absurdity will opt to passively acquiesce. That's incredibly dangerous.

Inventing reality is well-worn territory for Trump. It's why so many have described him throughout the campaign as "serially mendacious." An egregiously destructive recent example was his claim that "millions" of persons voted illegally in the election. Trump just made that up, providing no evidence whatsoever, presumably because his ego can't abide losing the popular vote to Clinton. But the harm that does to our democratic institutions is immense and intolerable.

We can expect Trump to assert all kinds of bald untruths during his coming administration, and to act upon those assertions. Whether or not he really believes these things is almost irrelevant. A president should speak the truth, but truth is becoming increasingly fungible and manipulable.

Such manipulation of reality is rightly called "Orwellian," and Orwell warned us against it for good reason. It's the stuff of authoritarian and especially totalitarian governments. We are about to experience something unprecedented in American governance: something with which our citizenry, with its increasingly flaccid critical-thinking organ, is ill equipped to deal.

I'll conclude with results from some recent elections to put Trump's "landslide" into historical perspective:

Trump's "Landslide" Compared To Recent Elections

Year	Electoral Votes, Winner	Loser(s)	Popular Vote Margin	Popular Vote Pct
2016	Trump 306	Clinton 232	Clinton +2.85 million	Clinton 48.1%, Trump 46.0%
2012	Obama 332	Romney 206	Obama +4.98 million	Obama 51.1%, Romney 47.2%
2008	Obama 365	McCain 173	Obama +9.55 million	Obama 52.9%, McCain 45.7%
2004	Bush 286	Kerry 251	Bush +3.01 million	Bush 51%, Kerry 48.5%
2000	Bush 271	Gore 266	Gore +0.54 million	Gore 48.4%, Bush 47.9%
1996	Clinton 379	Dole 159, Perot 0	Clinton +8.20 million	Clinton 49.2%, Dole 40.7%, Perot 8.4%
1984	Reagan 525 (that's a landslide!)	Mondale 13	Reagan +16.88 million	Reagan 58.8%, Mondale 40.6%

Copyright (C) 2016 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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