Stupid Trump Tweet

It looks like the title of this post will get a lot of repetition in the future. Here's the latest:

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

This is, quite simply, a lie. Trump is apparently going with the assertion by talk show host and right-wing nutball Bryan Fischer that 3 million illegal aliens had voted for Clinton (when of course illegal aliens cannot vote). On his program, Fischer said: “

You look at the margin in the popular vote that Hillary Clinton has,” he said, “it’s somewhere north of a million—they’re still counting—but let’s say she wins the popular vote by a million votes. It very well could be that what tipped the balance to Hillary Clinton were three million illegal aliens that simply had no right to vote, let alone even to be in this country.”

His supporting information for this ridiculous claim? Two tweets by a right-wing fanatic, a former Texas Health and Human Services Commission deputy commissioner named Gregg Phillips. Here's the first:

Completed analysis of database of 180 million voter registrations.

Number of non-citizen votes exceeds 3 million.

Consulting legal team.

And here's the second:

We have verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens.

We are joining .@TrueTheVote to initiate legal action.

Despite the lack of evidence, the lie found traction in the far-right blogosphere, and the story spread, to the extent that it was debunked at Snopes.com. Click here for an article by David Emery at Snopes entitled "Knock the Vote." It says: "Zero evidence has been put forth to support the widely parroted claim that 3 million "illegal aliens" voted in the 2016 presidential election." The article continues:

Origin: On 14 November 2016 — not even a week after the results of the 2016 presidential election were announced — our inbox exploded with messages requesting that we investigate the claim that more than three million votes were cast by "illegal immigrants" or "illegal aliens" (non-citizens). In some cases it was also claimed that these three million voters are "under investigation" for fraud, or that three million votes for Hillary Clinton will be "voided" because they were illegal. Under federal law, non-citizens cannot vote in a presidential election.

The first thing we found was that while no such claim has been reported in the mainstream media, it has been repeated on scores of partisan, right-leaning web sites since the 8 November election under the guise of "news." Here are a few examples:

The article then lists sites spreading this preposterous story, including such "dubious" (I'm being generous) sites as Allen West Republic, Alex Jones at Infowars, and alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart contributor and self-described "Dangerous Faggot." It goes on:

We scoured at least a dozen such articles for evidence to support the claim, but found none. All of them pointed back to the same source: a pair of tweets by someone named Gregg Phillips, whose Twitter profile identifies him as the founder of VoteStand ("America's first online fraud reporting app).

Snopes asked Phillips to provide backup for his assertions:

Phillips offers no evidence whatsoever to back up the claim that he "verified" more than three million non-citizen votes. Nor does he divulge his data sources or methodology, much less explain how it was possible to "verify" three million fraudulent votes within five days of a national election. In point of fact, Phillips bluntly refuses to share this information with journalists, claiming it will be released "in open form to the American people."

The article goes on to say that Phillips was known to Snopes from lies he had promulgated in the past.

America's tweeter-in-chief continues to develop his worldview by reading content in the far-right sewers of the Internet. Asked during the campaign to justify his retweet of a highly dubious claim, we got this response:

"Now, I don't know. What do I know about it? All I know is what's on the Internet," Trump said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

Charlie Pierce at Esquire says: "In short, the president-elect of the United States is trafficking in nonsense dredged up from the deepest and most feverish mudholes of the fever swamp."