CNN Calls Accurate Map Posted by Trump 'Wildly Misleading'
Even when President Donald Trump is right, he’s wrong, at least according to CNN.
On Tuesday, the network offered its slant on a map tweeted by Trump as part of the president’s Twitter counterattack against House Democrats’ ramped-up drive to impeach him.
Trump tweeted a mostly red map of the United States bearing the defiant inscription, “Try to impeach this.”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2019
The point of the map was that much of America supports a president to whom House Democrats are opposed, giving credence to Trump’s perspective that impeachment is the latest political ploy being used to hobble his administration.
More specifically, the map shows the counties won in 2016 by Trump in red, while the parts in blue represent counties that voted for his Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
CNN admitted the map’s overall point — that Trump won far more counties than did Clinton — is accurate. Then came the outlet’s case that accurate was not really accurate after all.
“But the map is also quite misleading,” CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza wrote.
“Why? Simple: What it shows is that Trump won more landmass than Clinton, which isn’t all that revealing. Lots and lots of those red counties have tiny populations — a fact you wouldn’t know by simply looking at that sea of red,” he added.
“Remember that Clinton won the popular vote against Trump by more than 2.8 million votes. That’s a far larger margin than the 543,000 more votes that Al Gore got than George W. Bush in 2000 even while losing the Electoral College.”
Democrats have made much of Clinton’s popular vote totals in their efforts to abolish the Electoral College and claim that Trump was not fairly elected.
However, according to figures reported by CBS News, Clinton’s margin over Trump in New York state was 1.7 million votes, while her margin in California was nearly 4.3 million votes.
Collectively, her margin of victory in those two states totals roughly six million votes. Take those two states away, and Clinton’s margin over Trump become a deficit.
This means that when one combines the results from the other 48 states, Trump had a solid popular vote majority.
Cillizza then sought to attack Trump for equating a president’s popularity with whether or not the president should be impeached, ignoring that fact that Democrats have been calling for Trump’s impeachment from virtually the moment he took the oath of office.
“Whether that is a willful misunderstanding or whether Trump plain doesn’t get why a president can be impeached is up for debate — and hard to know,” Cillizza wrote.
Trump, however, has said that behind all the talk of high crimes and misdemeanors is a simple lust for power on the part of Democrats.
….People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2019
That kind of calculation was not one Cillizza chose to make on CNN.
“But let’s be clear: The map the President tweeted on Tuesday morning presents a deeply misleading image of the 2016 electorate and shows a fundamental misread of the reasons presidents get impeached,” he wrote.
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