Less than a day after accidentally conceding the 2020 election to President-elect Joe Biden, President Donald Trump once again declared himself the victor on Twitter—and received a forceful fact check from the social media platform.
“I WON THE ELECTION!” Trump tweeted late Sunday night. Twitter deemed the all-caps missive untrue with a decisive label: “Official sources called this election differently.”
Twitter has labeled dozens, if not hundreds, of Trump’s tweets over the last several weeks, as the president has made myriad baseless accusations of voter fraud and prematurely declared victory in states that he lost, such as Pennsylvania. A cursory glance at the president’s Twitter feed will show many tweets accompanied by the disclaimer, “This claim about election fraud is disputed,” or, “Official source may not have called the race when this was Tweeted.”
Twitter has more recently begun applying its new disclaimer to Trump’s tweets, as on Friday, when he again claimed victory in Pennsylvania and alleged that 700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed. (Numerous outlets have called Pennsylvania for Biden.)
Twitter users have begun to mock and meme Trump’s victory claim, causing “WON THE ELECTION” to trend with nearly half a million tweets in the United States alone. Now that the burden of proof is a non-issue, anybody can apparently claim that they, too, have won the election.
That includes Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway’s corgis.
And Shrek’s diminutive villain, Lord Farquaad.
Even Rob Anderson, a Democrat who lost the 2018 race for Louisiana’s 3rd congressional district, got in on the fun.
Others have simply delighted in Twitter’s succinct, unambiguous rebuke of Trump’s victory claim.
Twitter user @StompTheGOP turned Trump’s latest false claim into a poem.
Other people followed Trump’s lead and attempted to manifest other personal victories that had no basis in reality, causing “I WON THE LOTTERY” to trend on Monday morning as well. This, of course, led to many accusations of “lottery fraud.”
Other responses to Trump’s victory tweet trended as well, including “NO YOU DIDN’T,” “I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY,” and “I’M TIRED OF THIS GRANDPA.”
At the time of this writing, Trump does not appear to have changed his tune. He continues to retweet baseless voter fraud allegations from Rudy Giuliani and alarmist claims about the Biden transition team from Stonewall Jackson (the Twitter account, not the late Confederate general).