Next month, Donald Trump will become president, just as he would have if he’d defeated Hillary Clinton in a landslide of Nixon-McGovern proportions. Nonetheless, Trump’s loss of the popular vote remains a liberal talking point, and a taunting point for Rolling Stone’s Jesse Berney. “Trump lost the vote for president by well over two-and-a-half million votes and counting, and it's driving him out of his mind,” wrote Berney in a Friday piece.
According to Berney, “The popular vote this year matters more than ever,” though Al Gore and the descendants of Samuel J. Tilden might disagree. Berney elaborated: “In an election that was more deeply about values than any in recent memory, it's important that a clear majority of Americans rejected a campaign premised on racist attacks against Mexicans and Muslims and a man with a long history of misogyny. The majority rejected a near-sociopathic celebration of ignorance and the least qualified person ever to become a major party's nominee for president.”
In Berney’s view, Trump is psychologically stunted in a way that’s affecting his transition and will affect his administration:
Trump is going to be the next president of the United States, but he's a loser, and he can't stand it. That's why he tweeted a lie about millions of Americans voting fraudulently to give Hillary Clinton the popular-vote victory. It doesn't matter whether he believes that to be true – he needs it to be true. Our thin-skinned baby president-elect hates the idea that millions more people voted for his opponent than for him, so he'll accept whatever made-up facts he needs to make it not so.
The schadenfreude over Trump's feelings of inadequacy is all well and good until you realize the impact his infantile need for approval will have on our country.
Berney’s a self-described “writer and Democratic activist” who’s “worked at the Democratic National Committee [and on] Hillary Clinton's first presidential campaign (we lost).”
