Let’s look at some fake news about some fake news:
The Democrats justify their questions [about President Trump’s mental health] by pointing to Trump’s habit of making demonstrably false claims. At a press conference Thursday, he said he’d had the biggest Electoral College win since President Ronald Reagan, for example, when his margin was lower than either of President Obama’s wins.
That’s from The Hill. I’m only going to look at modern history here, so I’ll largely ignore all the elections that occurred before Hawai’i and Alaska joined the union and gave us 538 total Electoral College votes. Ronald Reagan got the largest number of Electoral College votes in history (525) in 1984, which was good for the fifth highest percentage of votes ever. That was an improvement on the 489 votes he received in 1980, which was the ninth highest percentage ever.
Let’s look at the Electoral College tallies of the presidents who came after Reagan.
1988- George H.W. Bush: 426 votes, (22nd place)
1992- Bill Clinton: 370 votes, (30th place)
1996- Bill Clinton: 379 votes, (28th place)
2000- George W. Bush: 271 votes (55th place)
2004- George W. Bush: 286 votes (52nd place)
2008- Barack Obama: 365 votes (32nd place)
2012- Barack Obama: 332 votes (37th place)
Now, Donald Trump received 304 votes, which places him in 46th place. Even if we granted him the 306 votes that he erroneously claims for himself, it wouldn’t change how he compares to the other post-Reagan presidents. He got more Electoral College votes and a greater percentage of Electoral College votes than George W. Bush won in either of his campaigns, but he fell far below Poppy Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
When a reporter (citing Obama’s victories) challenged Trump on his claim that he’d had the biggest Electoral College win since Reagan, Trump initially tried to deflect the criticism by arguing that he meant the biggest Republican win since Reagan, but that wasn’t even close to being true since the biggest Electoral College win since Reagan was enjoyed by Republican George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Given that rebuttal, Trump claimed that someone had given him that information and that he wasn’t responsible if it wasn’t true. Lost in this back and forth, though, was the fact that Bill Clinton had the second and third biggest Electoral College victories since Reagan. It’s true that Clinton won in a race with a strong third party challenger and therefore didn’t get majorities in the popular vote, but that wasn’t the subject under discussion. In any case, Bill Clinton’s 49.2% tally in the three-way 1996 popular vote dwarfs the 45.98% tally Trump received in the largely two-way 2016 election.
The truth is that Trump got the second lowest percentage of the popular vote since Reagan, leading only Clinton’s 43.01% in 1992. And he had the third lowest Electoral College vote (out of a total of eight elections), beating only Dubya’s two elections.
What made Trump’s claim so delusional was that he had absolutely no basis for making it.
The Hill tried to point this out, but they completely failed to demonstrate the degree to which Trump was wrong, making it seem like only Obama had done better in the Electoral College.
It actually matters whether Trump is self-consciously lying or just spinning or is perhaps delusional. To assess that, it’s important to be clear just how far his claims are from anything resembling the truth. It’s also key to look at how he responds when challenged.