Trump Loves to Declare Victory Even if He Didn’t Win. Election Night May Be the Same.

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, PERIOD!”

Karl DeBlaker/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

According to an Axios report, Donald Trump is planning on declaring a premature victory if it appears that he is ahead before all the ballots are counted. Because coronavirus concerns curtailed in-person voting, many states, including pivotal ones like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, are dealing with a deluge of mail-in ballots, presumably from mostly Democratic voters. Trump has urged his supporters to vote in person to avoid non-existent mail-in voting fraud. But his campaign strategy seems to be that with many in-person votes cast for him, he will use the opportunity to claim victory early by lying that the remaining ballots are fraudulent. But, should Trump jump the gun and announce that he has been reelected for a second term before the final results are tallied ,it wouldn’t be the first time he falsely declared himself a winner—even though he wasn’t. 

Immediately after the 2016 election, before he was officially president, Trump claimed a victory that was not his. Perhaps, the only thing more stunning than Hillary Clinton’s defeat was the fact that she actually won the popular vote by 3 million ballots. Thanks to the Electoral College system, Clinton became the second Democrat—after Al Gore lost to George W. Bush in 2000—to lose the presidency despite winning more votes—in many ways because the system privileges a minority white party. Of course, Trump insisted he didn’t have fewer votes at all. Why? Because millions of illegal ballots were cast for Clinton. 

It may be completely illogical to rig an election for Clinton in which she still loses, but Trump doesn’t care about logic. He cares about being perceived as a loser.

In January 2017, Trump officially began his presidency with a whopper of a lie that only made headlines both because it was demonstrably false and because it was about something inconsequential. For weeks, Trump bragged that his Inauguration would have record-setting turnout. Crowd estimates for the event were between 700,000 to 900,000—compared to Obama’s 1.8 million for his 2009 Inauguration. Side-by-side photos of the two inaugurations easily proved that Trump hadn’t shattered any records. But that didn’t stop then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (remember him?) from making an angry TV appearance that would set the tone for all Trump officials over the next four years. 

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, PERIOD!” Spicer said forcefully from the White House press briefing room, clearly playing to an audience of one. “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm around the inauguration are shameful and wrong.” Spicer resigned just six months later, but every Trump official after him would have to show this same kind of deference to a president obsessed with looking like a winner. 

Fast forward to the 2018 midterm elections. Trump’s unpopularity had weighed heavily on Republicans in down-ballot races and led to a massive blue wave. The Democrats regained control of the US House and won decisively in several state races like Nevada and Michigan. But even so, for the president, the 2018 midterms were a vindication of his successful leadership.

Of course, the most damning false victory he’s declared has been the one against the coronavirus. On election eve, more than 230,000 people in the United States will have died from COVID-19. Approximately 9 million people have been infected and cases are surging in dozens of states. From the beginning, Trump downplayed the threat of the virus and his administration’s pandemic response (or lack thereof) has been riddled with misinformation and denial.

But the president keeps insisting we’re almost out of the woods, victorious over a deadly pandemic. “We’re rounding the corner,” he’s repeated over and over again since August. He’s promised a vaccine would be ready before the election and when the United States hit 200,000 deaths Trump insisted few were affected by it. He was hospitalized less than two weeks later. Then he turned his discharge into yet another personal triumph, claiming he was immune in a video posted to Twitter.

“We’re going back to work. We’re going to be out front, As your leader, I had to do that. I knew there’s danger to it, but I had to do it,” he rambled. “I stood out front. I led. Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did. And I know there’s a risk, there’s a danger, but that’s OK. And now I’m better and maybe I’m immune, I don’t know. But don’t let it dominate your lives.”

Last week, Trump repeated the lie that case numbers are high because of increased testing, and that the US is doing better than Europe.

In reality, the United States is headed into the worst phase of the pandemic yet. Hospitals across the country are overwhelmed with COVID patients, and we continue to shatter records for daily case counts. It feels more like a surrender than a victory.

Despite his long track record of claiming victory without any evidence, Trump insisted the reports about his premature declaration of victory are fake. But he has made it clear that he’s planning a bitter fight in the courts to have mail-in ballots in key states discredited, because in his mind, he’s already the winner. “As soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers,” he told reporters on Sunday night decrying Supreme Court rulings that are allowing Pennsylvania and North Carolina to continue counting ballots that come in after election day. “Because we’re doing great in Nevada. We’re doing great in Arizona, we’re doing great all over.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate