Amazing. The man just cannot let this lunacy go.
In his first meeting with congressional leaders of both parties since taking office, President Donald Trump on Monday reiterated a debunked claim that he only lost the national popular vote because of widespread voter fraud. [...]
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) confirmed that Trump made the voter fraud claim, but added, "I didn't pay a lot of attention to it. I was ready to move onto some policy issues. I didn't anticipate that discussion."
It's further evidence of Trump’s fixation with his narrow victory, in which he captured an Electoral College handily despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes.
The Washington Post is more specific: Trump told our nation’s top legislators that “between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused him to lose the popular vote.”
The premise Trump went with immediately after the election was that he would have won the popular vote if it weren't for "millions of people who voted illegally." This is obviously insane—there isn't evidence even a thousand people voted illegally, much less "millions." Trump has provided no justification for his claim other than his own say-so, nor has anybody else on his team. It's not just false: It's delusional. It’s akin to believing the moon landings were faked by “illegal” astronauts.
But Dear Leader apparently has to believe this fraudulent version of events, because it's the only way the delusional narcissist can make sense of not being as popular with the public as he thinks he ought to be. It must be a plot against him. Those voters must be illegal voters, just as his own inaugural crowds were undoubtably super-bigly but a media conspiracy must have been launched to make them look less bigly than they were.
Will anyone on his team attempt to justify Trump's now-repeated statement that "illegal votes" lost him the popular vote? Probably not. We're probably all supposed to take it like Republican John Cornyn took it—as one of the new president's lapses into insanity that we're all going to pretend to not take notice of because it would just be terribly inconvenient to contemplate how this man's narcissistic ravings about his invisible enemies may or may not be evidence of an unstable mind.
Are we drug testing Trump? Does he have new government doctors who can confirm, with less buffoonery and bravado than his own personal doctor did, that the man is not out of his gourd? Nope. Donald Trump believes in vast invisible conspiracies all bent towards tarnishing his own personal greatness, and here's our fine House and Senate leadership still sweating bullets and hoping that in the in-between points he'll maybe "move onto some policy issues." Oh, bravo. This is going swimmingly.