The publication of the book Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff heightened the national angst over the first year of the presidency of Donald Trump. This associated fury includes the natural question of “how did this Presidency occur?” Independent of this recent focus the die was already cast for historians and political scientists to be addressing the question. This post and its associated white paper address and answer the question. In short, the answer lies through a quirk provided by a Triple Whammy:

1. The FBI James Comey Letter to Congress, dated October 28, 2016;
2. Republican driven voter suppression; and
3. Russian-driven fake news.

Donald Trump became president despite losing the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes. The three swing states of  Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (hereafter referred to as MWP) provided the winning margin in the anachronistic Electoral College. Numerous articles appear in the press describing
specific, single, or individual components of the triple whammy and the likely effect on Trump’s margin in MWP and how these three states may have tilted the Electoral College. In an article in Vox titled “How to Hijack an Election”, William deBuys addresses all three factors in a generalized description but his lack of any numerical accounting allows the issue to fester without any definitive conclusion (aggravated by Trump’s tweets about the brilliance of his victory).

My white paper goes beyond deBuy’s analysis by examining, gleaning, and coalescing actual facts and data from various research studies on each of the three components and then showing, with detailed mathematical accounting, how the aggregate vote impact of the three, individually and collectively, in each MWP state, more than exceeded Trump’s MWP margins- and thus led to his gaining the Presidency.

Read the entire white paper: Triple Whammy Paper.pdf