Photo: C-SPAN/c-span.org

Yesterday was an especially distressing one for President Trump, as the Senate received articles of impeachment, which he has called a “stigma.” The president is especially prone to triggering by anything that questions his legitimacy — such as his famous Inauguration Day meltdown, when the massive anti-Trump marches and sparsely attended inaugural festivities led him to order press secretary Sean Spicer to make absurd lies.

Initially, Trump’s favorite method of insisting I am too a real president was to fabricate charges that he would have won the national vote but for massive voter fraud. (“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”). By the middle of his first year, he had discovered a map that seemed to convey the same point.

That map of counties he won sitting on the Resolute Desk has been a talisman since soon after Sessions recused from the Russia probe. He started handing them out to people shortly before Mueller was named; aides got the first large one to frame the day after Comey was fired. https://t.co/uMWip7u6gX — Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 17, 2020

Yesterday, hosting a Christian right event, Trump brought out his emotional support map again. A county-by-county red-blue projection relied on the visual trick that Republicans tend to reside in counties with low populations, while Democrats tend to reside in counties with high populations. Thus the minority of voters who supported Trump is turned into a majority of acres:

Photo: Carlos Barria/REUTERS

That land mass alone is an unreliable indicator is a conclusion that has been reached long ago by every schoolchild who stared at a map and then learned that Canada and Greenland are not world powers. It may or may not have sunk in with the president (who has, perhaps not coincidentally, sought to acquire Greenland). In any case, the map seems to fulfill Trump’s need to prove to himself or others that he actually is loved by the people, or at least by acreage.