Introduction

On November 8, 2016 Republican standard-bearer Donald J. Trump shook the American political landscape to its foundations, from the peninsula of the Sunshine State north to Coal Country and west across the fruited plain. In light of Democrats’ relative advantage in delegate-rich states in the northeast and California, his Electoral College victory was tantamount to drawing an inside straight at a poker table somewhere at a remote, Native-owned casino in “flyover territory.” Indeed, bettors in Las Vegas and abroad staked the odds against a Trump victory at five to one on Election Day. Written off by pundits, disdained by the media, derided by Democrats, and scorned by so-called “establishment” primary rivals in the Grand Old Party (GOP) for whom he invented flippant and insulting sobriquets, the idiosyncratic and irascible business mogul seemingly surprised everyone—save perhaps himself—by narrowly prevailing in key swing states including Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to carry the Electoral College 304–227 over rival Hillary Clinton.

Trump dismissed critics who immediately called into question the legitimacy of his victory. His detractors underscored that he lost the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million ballots, the largest margin in U.S. history. Holding steadfast in the Machiavellian messaging that characterized his campaign, the president- elect ignited a Twitterstorm within days of his victory by drawing upon a central component of his populist political instincts, conspiracy theory, to provide an alternative narrative to Clinton's future book What Happened. Rejecting the thesis of Russian interference in the election, dismissing the impact of the late October reopening of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) inquiry into the former Secretary of State's handling of emails, and shrugging off allegations of collusion between members of his campaign and the Kremlin in Moscow, Trump contended instead, without any empirical evidence, that “[i]n addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”