“I thought and felt I would win big, easily over the fabled 270 (306). When they cancelled fireworks, they knew, and so did I.” | Getty Trump rehashes election victory

Donald Trump always knew he was going to win the presidential election, the president-elect wrote on Twitter Monday afternoon, even if nobody else did.

“Various media outlets and pundits say that I thought I was going to lose the election. Wrong, it all came together in the last week and,” Trump wrote on Twitter, breaking his message into two posts. “I thought and felt I would win big, easily over the fabled 270 (306). When they cancelled fireworks, they knew, and so did I.”


Trump's insistence on Monday that he had always been certain of a victory contradicts what he told attendees at one of his so-called "thank you" rallies in Wisconsin. There, he told the crowd that he "really assumed I lost" on Election Day as he was told of exit poll results.

While Trump earned 306 electoral votes on Election Day, he wound up with 304 thanks to a pair of Republican electors in Texas who voted against him.

The fireworks referenced by Trump were those planned by Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which were set to be set off over the Hudson River in New York in celebration of her widely-expected victory. Instead, the mood inside her Election Night party, held inside the glass-ceilinged Javits Center, gradually dampened and Clinton never emerged, waiting until the next day to deliver a concession speech.

Trump won the White House by a relatively wide Electoral College margin, but his victory came thanks largely to narrow wins in traditionally Democrat-leaning states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The president-elect actually lost the overall popular vote by roughly three million votes, although Trump has argued that he would have been able to win that as well if he had campaigned with it in mind.