After Trump’s surprising/depressing victory a week ago, some tweets he sent out in 2012 decrying the Electoral College and calling for revolution (he thought Mitt Romney had won the popular vote, which Romney didn’t by a very large margin) were retweeted tens of thousands of times.
The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012
But on Tuesday, Trump took to Twitter to defend the Electoral College, without which he would currently be presiding over a crumbling business empire.
If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2016
The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2016
The mix of ignorance and insecurity here is vintage Trump. He is unable to admit that he lost the popular vote—and it looks like he will lose by a much larger margin than George W. Bush in 2000—so he throws out counterfactuals as cover.
But the funniest thing about these two tweets is that they contradict each other. In the first tweet, Trump hits on the problem with the Electoral College, which is that it privileges swing states above all other states, meaning that we end up with elections like this one, where nearly all of the campaigning was done in four states: Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Whatever you may think of the Electoral College, there is no argument that its genius lies in the fact that it brings “all states” into play—if it did then Trump would have had to test his theory and campaign in New York and California.
Also, by this logic, Hillary Clinton would campaigned in those places, too.