Within days of the 2016 presidential election, which Donald Trump won in the Electoral College but lost to Hillary Clinton in the popular vote, Trump openly questioned the popular vote results that showed him well behind Clinton. In a message to his Twitter account on November 27, 2016, Trump claimed, "I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."
But there was no evidence for Trump's claim that "millions" of illegal votes were cast — all of them for Hillary Clinton — and in fact, an exhaustive study by The Washington Post found exactly four documented cases of fraudulent voting nationwide during the 2016 election out of more than 130 million votes cast.
Nor has any evidence has emerged in the interim to support Trump's claim, but that did not stop him from repeating the same falsehood once again in an NBC News Meet The Press interview that aired on Sunday morning. That interview is viewable online via YouTube, as posted by NBC News.
When NBC interviewer Chuck Todd asked Trump if he was "bothered" by "the fact that you lost the popular vote," as quoted by MediaIte, Trump responded by saying that he did not "believe" the popular vote totals.
Those final totals showed Clinton with 65,853,516 votes, to 62,984,825 for Trump — a difference of nearly 2.9 million votes in Clinton's favor — according to final Federal Election Commission totals.