In which I grade a Trump tweet. This... will not go well.

 Perhaps you have been out of school for long enough to have lost track of the academic calendar.  Otherwise, you are aware that this is grading season, in which those of us in my bizarre profession make our lists of who has been naughty, who has been nice, and so forth.  It is not the highlight of the job, and I need a break from grading.  I shall do this by... grading a Trump tweet, as though it were a political science assignment.  What could possibly go wrong?  This will be less stressful than grading, right?  Right?

Anyway, a thing happened yesterday.  It should not have been news, but the world is not as it should be.  The Majority Leader of the Senate congratulated the President-elect.  How is this news?  Because the Majority Leader of the Senate leads a party of liars and craven cowards held in thrall to a conspiracy theorist who is still in denial about the fact that he lost, and that he has been laughed out of court.  So, a Republican acknowledging that Biden is about to be President is somehow news.  It is news because it is new, and different.  Because the world is crazy.

Well, Trump didn't like that.  So what did he do?  Of course, he tweeted, because he's a manly man, performing masculinity.  That's what we keep being told, right?  WWRT?  [What Would Rambo Tweet?]  Not this, but it's what Trump tweeted:  "Mitch, 75,000,000,000 VOTES, a record for a sitting President (by a lot).  Too soon to give up.  Republican Party must finally learn to fight.  People are angry!"

One thing that can be said for twitter is that it limits the length of the paper I must grade from this particular nightmare student.  So let's do this thing.

I would refrain from making stylistic comments on any such "paper."  As a general rule, I refrain from critiquing style or correcting grammar and syntax for the following reason:  many students misunderstand how grades are assigned.  I could cover a paper with red ink (I'm not actually allowed to use red ink-- it hurts their feelings) addressing minor stylistic issues that have little to no impact on the grade I assign, and then write four or five sentences of comments at the end pointing out fatal flaws in the logic of a paper.  If the total ink spilt on the paper dealing with style overshadows the total ink spilt addressing logic, many students falsely conclude that they are being graded too harshly for style, regardless of what I say on that point.  So, I stopped writing stylistic comments long ago, in order to avoid any confusion.

Nevertheless, if I am going to do this, I will make several observations, while noting here that they are trivial.  I could comment on the fact that Trump ended a sentence with a preposition ("up"), or more glaringly, his puzzling and pointless use of capitalization.  That appears to be something like a written form of Tourette for Trump.  There is neither rhyme nor reason to his use of capitalization, and it is distracting for a reader.

I would not, however, deduct any points for these trivialities.  WE have SUBSTANCE to ADDRESS here.

Trump makes one empirical observation-- a nationwide raw vote total.  This is a basic misunderstanding of civics, on many levels.  First, as I often need to remind people, we do not have a nationwide popular vote system.  If you aggregate raw votes across states, then, you are both computing a meaningless number given our electoral system, and computing a number that is misleading because it has been affected by the structure of our electoral system.

Normally, I give this lecture to Democrats who whine about the 2000 or 2016 elections.  They complain about having lost the electoral college (which is the actual contest), while having "won" the "popular vote."  However, since there is no such thing as the popular vote, they didn't win anything.  Here's the problem, restated again.  The candidates campaign in the swing states, and part of campaigning is mobilization.  Turnout is driven higher in the swing states as a result of their importance.  The disproportionate role of a vote in a swing state, and the campaign effects on turnout there, influence vote counts.  If it were a national vote contest, it would become more important for Democrats to improve turnout in California, and for Republicans to improve turnout throughout the bible belt.  Were that to happen, the numbers nationwide would not have been the same.  A nationwide popular vote election would not have the same vote totals.

What would the totals have been?  We don't know.  We can't know.  Rather, looking at the nationwide "popular vote" under an electoral college system is just pointless.  It is a meaningless and misleading number, like "points" in a chess game.  Yeah, you can say that a rook is worth five points, but it's checkmate or nothing, baby!

Yet, what Trump did is worse than that.  When Democrats commit the "popular vote" fallacy, they at least say, "but we won the popular vote."  They point to the nationwide vote totals in 2000 or 2016, and observe that Gore's total was higher than Bush 43's total, or that Clinton's total was higher than Trump's total.  Were these meaningful totals?  No.  However, at least they were comparisons.  My candidate got more than your candidate.  It was a fallacy, but an understandable fallacy because you have to think through the mechanics and mathematics of voting in an electoral college system to understand why it is a fallacy.

What Trump is doing here is worse.  He is comparing his vote total, not to Biden's, but to past incumbent presidents' totals.  Why?  Biden got more votes.  The popular vote doesn't matter, but to point to 75,000,000 should raise the question, not of how many votes previous incumbent presidents got, but of how many Biden got.  Scratch that.  It should make you say, no, that's not how it works.  We have an electoral college system, go back to high school and take a civics class because you clearly cannot pass a citizenship test.

However, note how bizarre this fallacy is.  Of course subsequent presidents receive more total votes, nationwide, than previous incumbent presidents.  Why?  The population of the country increases.  Unless either turnout drops precipitously, or an incumbent performs sufficiently worse than past incumbents given population growth (and because of polarization, that isn't likely) the trend of increasing raw votes is almost a mathematical given at this point.

We could pick apart the "by a lot" phrase, but it isn't really worth it, all things considered.  That's just a Trump verbal/written tic, like random capitalization.

Continuing.  Trump claims that it is too soon to give up, and since I am being casual with my grammar, I shall not penalize him for the preposition at the end of his sentence.  Nevertheless, the obvious civics point here is that the electoral college has voted.  What determines "too soon" is not the raw number of votes he got, nor its comparison to past incumbent presidents, but the vote counting process.  His nationwide vote total has nothing to do with the process of counting or validating votes.  The thing that makes it too late is the very thing he elides by mentioning only his raw vote total-- the electoral college.  

Trump next claims that the Republican party must "learn to fight," [emphasis added].  The premise is that the party did not fight before.  While one may find Republicans against whom this charge could be leveled, the last Republican against whom the charge could be leveled is Mitch McConnell.  Ask Merrick Garland if McConnell is the kind of person who shies from a fight.  Or... Amy Coney Barrett, who benefited from the fact that McConnell was lying about his commitment to the rule he invented to block Garland's confirmation.  McConnell, more than anyone else in the party, is committed to total warfare.

The difference is that he knows when the fight is over, and he is done indulging Trump's Black Knight thing.  As a basic empirical point, the Republican Party has not shied from fights at any point in decades.

We then come to Trump's final point.  People are angry.  At one level, those who lose an election will tend to be unhappy, but the real source of Republican anger in the electorate is that Trump has been lying to them.  He has been lying to them, first about the legitimacy of the election itself, and second about whether or not it is over.  So yes.  They are angry.  Because Trump stoked that anger.

Yet that anger is also irrelevant to the point of basic civics.  McConnell congratulated Biden because the electoral college voted.  He congratulated Biden because he recognized the fact that it is over.  That fact is true regardless of how angry Republican voters are.  That anger is a) immaterial, and b) a consequence of Trump's lies, which are further embodied in this tweet itself.

So behold.  What kind of grade do you think Trump deserves?  It deserves an F, obviously, but I'll spare you a lecture on grade inflation today.  Would I be allowed to flunk the little shit?  No.  Sadly, no.  This doesn't rise to the level of basic civics, but even at the college level, I wouldn't be allowed to flunk him.

Yet notice something else.  A full explanation (to the degree that this constitutes "full") of exactly how blinkered just one Trump tweet is takes all of this.

This is why it has always been a mug's game to try to fact check Trump.  He wins just by getting you to play.