Eric Trump’s latest tweet about the election hasn’t gone down the way he hoped

Eric Trump is nothing if not loyal to his father’s narrative.

Since the US election was called for Joe Biden, President Trump has been consistently pushing unfounded theories of voter fraud, and suggesting that it is in fact him who won the presidency.

This has been disputed by basically everyone, including Twitter itself which keeps flagging the president’s tweets to let followers know that his claims are, essentially, false.

Not to be out-done, the president’s son Eric is in on the action too.

On Saturday he posted a tweet which seemed to suggest that the election result cannot be true because Biden won more votes than Obama did for his second term.

It’s curious as it seems to imply that Eric believes Obama to be a highly successful politician. Something we won’t dispute, but certain members of his family (especially those who pushed racist birther conspiracy theories) might.

For clarity, Biden did win more votes than Obama. In fact, he won more votes than any other president in the history of US elections.

This success has been parsed and discussed ad infinitum, but essentially the 2020 election saw a huge surge in voter turnout from both parties, but it especially benefitted the Democrats. Biden’s consistent push for voters to use mail-in ballots due to the Covid-19 pandemic has been credited as part of the reason, while Trump actively told his supporters not to.

In addition, huge efforts from community organisers like Stacey Abrams saw record numbers of voters registering for the first time. Black voters in particular – perhaps more motivated than ever to vote following the renewed Black Lives Matter movement – played a part in Biden’s victory.

Still, as per the apparent Trump family ethos, Eric was not about to let pesky facts get in the way of his political posturing on his dad’s behalf.

Presumably because of the wording, the tweet wasn’t flagged by Twitter. People are of course free to speculate as long as they’re not specifically making false assertions.

However, the good people of Twitter did the hard work of pointing out a very obvious reason for Biden’s success: his opponent.

We can only assume that thousands of people dragging his dad all across the internet was not exactly what Eric had in mind when he posted the tweet.

Better luck next time?

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