Sanders says Trump won by ‘overwhelming majority of 63 million’

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders during a Monday press briefing said President Trump won by an “overwhelming majority” of 63 million votes — despite the fact that his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, won 65.8 million votes and he lost the popular vote.

Trump did win the electoral college, which determines the presidency, and he did so handily, winning 304 electoral votes compared to 227 for Clinton.

That’s more electoral college votes than any GOP president since George H.W. Bush in 1988, though fewer than what former President Obama won in 2008 and 2012.

“He got elected by an overwhelming majority of 63 million Americans who came out and supported him and wanted to see his policies enacted. He’s delivered on that,” Sanders said during her first White House press briefing in weeks.

She make the remark while going over the accomplishments of the president, which she said were ignored by much of the news media.

Sanders’s comment on Monday was only the most recent attempt by the White House to claim that Trump won a majority of votes in 2016.

The president has repeatedly touted the falsehood that he won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” a claim that has been disproven multiple times. Studies have shown that voter fraud was not a widespread issue during the 2016 election.

Multiple journalists and commentators immediately took to social media to fact-check Sanders’s Monday assertion.

Sanders spent the bulk of the press briefing casting blame on the news media for dividing the country, saying the media typically reports negatively about the president.

She declined to name any media outlets in particular.

[The Hill]

Leave a Reply