The post that went up Saturday afternoon is a syllogism. 'With only bad Press and Fake News, I won the Presidential Election IN A LANDSLIDE. Therefore, the Media has NO CREDIBILITY!' [1]. The conclusion - no credibility - is drawn from the premise, the landslide. That makes the premise worth checking, because everything after 'Therefore' depends on it.

Trump won 77,284,118 votes to Kamala Harris's 74,999,166 - 49.8 percent to 48.3, a margin of 1.5 percentage points [2]. The Council on Foreign Relations places that margin fifth-smallest among the 32 presidential races held since 1900 [2]. Whatever a landslide is, it is not the fifth-narrowest result in 124 years.

2024 popular vote
Trump77.28 million votesHarris75 million votes
49.8% to 48.3% - a 1.5-point margin, the fifth-smallest of the 32 presidential races since 1900 [2].
Data
Trump77.28 million votes
Harris75 million votes

There is a second detail the word erases. Trump won a plurality, not a majority - 49.8 percent is less than half. As the Council on Foreign Relations puts it, 'more people voted for someone not named Trump for president than voted for Trump in 2024' [2]. FactCheck.org, correcting the opposite falsehood that he lost the popular vote, drew the line precisely: 'Trump has not won an outright majority of the popular vote... He has won a large plurality' [3]. A large plurality is a real thing and a narrow one.

The Electoral College tells the same story at a different scale: 312 to 226 [4]. That is a solid result and a middling one historically - six more electoral votes than Biden's 306 in 2020, 53 fewer than Obama's 365 in 2008 [4]. It sits in the lower half of US presidential outcomes, not the top.

None of this unwins the election. Trump won, cleanly and legitimately, and this piece does not suggest otherwise. The word doing the work in Saturday's post is 'landslide,' and it is carrying more than the vote count will bear - which is why CNN's own post-election analysis, no friend or foe of the number, ran under the headline 'Trump's win was real but not a landslide' [2][4]. The media's credibility can be argued on the merits. It cannot be settled by a margin that was, in fact, one of the closest of the past century.