President-elect Trump’s incoming chief of staff on Tuesday rejected the idea that Russia helped Trump win the White House, and chalked it up to sour grapes from a left-leaning press that wanted Hillary Clinton.
“This whole thing is really a play by the liberal media to take away a legitimate electoral landslide from President-elect Trump,” Reince Priebus said on Fox News.
He said there are several reasons why Trump won, and most of them are related to Trump overperforming and Clinton underperforming in the race.
“The reason Donald Trump won was that he swept the country with a message like no one’s ever seen,” he said. “He won because Hillary decided to ignore Wisconsin and Michigan. I’m sure the Russians didn’t advise her of that.”
Priebus also rejected the idea that Trump’s openness to having a productive relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin is somehow harmful to the United States.
“Having relationships with people is not a bad thing,” he said. “I don’t know how we got to the place where having an actual functional relationship with someone who might not be a person that we’d first think of to have that relationship with is suddenly a bad thing.”
