PresidentDonald Trump, who never met a meme he didn’t like, on Tuesday tried to defend himself against possible impeachment with a boastful and very misleading map of his supporters.
Other Trumps shared the map, too, including the president’s daughter-in-law and campaign adviserLara Trumpand his sonDonald Trump Jr.
The map, though accurate in terms of landmass, conflates empty space with number of supporters: The wide swaths of red match up with few votes for Trump, relative to geographic size.
While Trump won 2,626 counties versusHillary Clinton, who won 487 counties, she received nearly three million more votes than he did — many of them in the metropolitan areas where the majority of people actually live.
The map’s color-coding of red and blue was quickly questioned, with some Twitter userspointing out mistakesin how it depicts the results. Othersoffered more accurate visualizationsof how many people across the country voted for each candidate.
Princeton University history professor Kevin M. Krusealso pointed outthat Trump’s map is less red than Republican President Richard Nixon’s. Like Trump, Nixon faced possible impeachment — but resigned before he could be removed from office.
Last week, House Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry against Trump, with Clinton telling PEOPLE,“We are in a crisis.”
“I did not come to that decision easily or quickly,” she said during an exclusive interview set to be published in this week’s issue, “but this is an emergency as I see it. … This latest behavior around Ukraine, trying to enlist the president of Ukraine in a plot to undermine former Vice President Biden or lose the military aid he needs to defend against Trump’s friend Vladimir Putin — if that’s not an impeachable offense, I don’t know what is.”
Clinton wasreferring to reportsthat Trump had stopped financial support for Ukraine, which is in a conflict with Russia, before he pushed Ukraine’s president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and Biden’s sonHunter.
Trump has said the two were not related and that his call with Ukraine’s president was not improper. He dismissed criticism that he used his power as president for blatant electioneering as a “witch hunt.”
Last weekhe tweeted, “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!”
While initial polling does not show a clear consensus on how Americans feel about Trump being investigated for impeachment, several polls do show the public becoming more supportive in the wake of further information about the Ukraine controversy — including the release of an initial whistleblower complaint from inside the government.
Congress is in recess for two weeks, but House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said hearings could begin as soon as this week.
source: people.com
