Everyone in Washington knows Miles’s law: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”

Rufus E. Miles Jr. was a Truman administration bureaucrat who coined that phrase (as well as other maxims that President-elect Donald Trump would do well to study).

There can be no truer example of this than Trump’s position on the electoral college. He won the electoral college but is on track to lose the popular vote by more than 1 million votes.

First, let’s look at Trump’s position in 2012, when it appeared that Mitt Romney might win the popular vote but lose the electoral college.

Interestingly, Trump has deleted a number of tweets he sent in 2012, including:

“He [Obama] lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!” (Nov. 6)
“The phoney [sic] electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one!” (Nov. 6)
“More votes equals a loss…revolution!” (Nov. 7)

But other tweets from that period remain, including:

Yet on Tuesday, Trump tweeted:

The Pinocchio Test

As we said, where you stand depends on where you sit.

When Trump thought President Obama had won the electoral college while losing the popular vote, Trump thought the electoral college was a “disaster for a democracy.”

Now that he himself won the electoral college with narrow wins in three states, while losing the popular vote, Trump thinks it’s a “genius” system. He’s right that campaign strategies would have been different if the election were determined by the popular-vote margin, but apparently that was not important to him in 2012.

Trump earns a Upside-Down Pinocchio, for an unacknowledged change in position.

An Upside-Down Pinocchio

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