Heading into the initial round of election results from around the country, Donald Trump sounded like he was working to project a sense of self-aggrandizing confidence, even in the face of a sometimes staggering array of polls from across the country that have shown him losing by big margins in the final lead-up to Election Day. In their final pre-Election Day forecast, FiveThirtyEight gave Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden an about 89 percent chance of winning the presidency. No matter these facts: at 6:15 P.M. local time, Trump posted an all-caps message on Twitter, where he insisted that his campaign was “LOOKING REALLY GOOD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY.” In reality, most of the country had not officially reported any vote tallies as of the time of his post, no matter any early election-related data.
Nevertheless, Trump triumphantly posted the following message:
‘WE ARE LOOKING REALLY GOOD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. THANK YOU!’
WE ARE LOOKING REALLY GOOD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. THANK YOU!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2020
In reality: Trump’s campaign definitely isn’t looking “really good” across the United States. It’s just not. In an early Tuesday appearance on Fox, White House press secretary and top Trump campaign adviser Kayleigh McEnany insisted that the Trump campaign believed that a Trump “landslide” was imminent, but this notion just did not reflect the facts at hand. Steep concerns have swirled about whether the president will accept the election results if he loses, since he has openly threatened to reject the results, and he and his campaign have attacked the credibility of ballot-counting procedures in states like Pennsylvania and Nevada. During an early Tuesday appearance on Fox & Friends, Trump insisted that there’s “no reason to play games” — although that’s exactly what he’s done in the lead-up to Election Day, to say the least.
"There’s no reason to play games. I look at it as being a very…a very solid chance of winning here. I don’t know how they rate the chances," President Trump says on Fox and Friends. "I think a lot of that has to do with the tremendous crowd size.”
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) November 3, 2020
Interestingly, in early CNN exit polling, a “narrow majority” of respondents said “that the nation’s priority now should be containing the coronavirus over rebuilding the economy,” the outlet reports. Thus, Trump’s stance of complaining about attention that the Coronavirus pandemic has gotten doesn’t exactly seem well-poised to have resonated with voters across the country. Coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have been rising across the country — but throughout the crisis, Trump has stuck to his politicized treatment of the pandemic, claiming — wrongly — that media outlets covering the virus are trying to make him look bad.
Check out Twitter’s response to Trump’s overly self-confident Election Night Twitter message below:
