Hillary Clinton won the presidential election by more than 2 million votes, or 1.5 percent of votes cast. But we get Donald Trump.
Cowboy up, people. Yes, Trump lost. But under rules of the game, he has a legitimate claim to the presidency. Our core strength is that we’re a nation of laws. Trump gets a chance to govern.
Have trouble with that? Fast forward to the next election. Consider the impact on the electorate’s trust in the legitimacy of our electoral system if Trump were denied the right to govern after winning by the rules.
Voters would know they cannot trust that the legal protocols for peaceful transfer of power will be followed. If that happens, we’re undone as a democracy. A Trump presidency poses severe tests of our democratic institutions. This is just one of them.
However, not everyone thinks we’re legally stuck with Trump. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, a 2015 Democratic presidential primary candidate, says the constitution allows electors to vote for whomever they wish. What electors must decide is if there’s good reason to vote against the people’s choice, he says. Since there’s not, Lessig argues, electors should vote for Clinton on Dec. 19.
We meanwhile must focus on Trump. He openly has displayed his anti-democratic impulses and repeatedly demonstrated that nothing he says is to be believed. My guess — subject to revision — is that his polices will be guided more by his narcissistic need for applause than by any core values (except personal enrichment). Like your dog, Trump seems poised to perform for praise. He’s surrounded by a cast of unseemly characters vying for power in the vacuum of Trump’s ignorance. It has the makings of a Shakespearean tragedy.
Find comfort where you can: Richard Milhous Nixon resigned in disgrace to avoid impeachment for Watergate, but he gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. Lyndon Baines Johnson improved the lives of millions of Americans with civil rights, voting rights, Medicare, Medicaid and the War on Poverty. But his first public office was won by fraud.
Trump may surprise us. Or he may prove that what we’ve seen is exactly what we get. Stay on red alert. Master the ennobling art of sucking lemonade out of a very bitter lemon.
Trump irresponsibly chose to appeal to the worst in us. In a more perfect world, that should have disqualified him from holding public office. He’s fairly judged as dangerous — lacking in judgment and compassion, perhaps incapable of understanding, or caring about, the consequences of his actions. His careless utterances gave permission to the illegitimately aggrieved, notably racists and sexists, to say the unspeakable. He actively encouraged his supporters in their assorted hatreds.
Been there, done all this, people. It ended in tears.
Had Trump not chosen to follow Hitler’s playbook on his path to power, he would not merit this extraordinary scrutiny. He followed the aspiring tyrants’ shopworn map: tell outrageous “Big Lies” repeatedly until they are accepted as truth, blame certain minority groups for social problems, judge individuals not on their own merit but as members of a group and discredit, or silence, independent news media.
Read what follows as special pleading if you must, but it’s on your behalf: despite all its maddening shortcomings, the traditional, multi-sourced, fact-checked news media that Trump brags of circumventing via Twitter remains the most reliable source of independently reported news — not his outrageous utterances or the fake news/blogosphere Internet cesspool offerings that fueled his rise. Ominously, Trump continues to threaten independent news media. But it does not exist to serve politicians. It exists to serve you. Support it.
Do thank Trump for this much: His hate-filled rallies showed just how thin the veneer of civilization really is. As New York Times columnist Roger Cohen so elegantly put it, Trump came along just at the moment many Americans were “getting in touch with their inner reptile.”
But this ignores that many voters who chose Trump were neither racist or sexist but simply, and legitimately, felt abandoned. So once again, we learn this: Any nation shrugs off the suffering of its citizens at its peril. First principle: The political stability of the United States directly depends on the well-being of its working/middle classes. Full stop. How many more times must we learn this? Hello? Democrats?
We soon may know if Trump’s simple-minded solutions to complex problems means he actually believes he’ll have the dictatorial powers some of his solutions require.
With Trump in charge, Republicans, though saddled with an unpredictable president who isn’t quite a Republican, will have a chance to show how well they can govern. They will control the executive branch, both houses of Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. The checks and balances on institutional power will all but vanish. Legislation can — yet may not — pass unimpeded through Congress like grease through a goose.
We’ve also learned this: We needn’t trouble ourselves to seek moral instruction from Evangelicals or other religious worthies, who flocked to Trump’s side despite his lurid displays of anti-Christian values.
Most importantly, we’ve learned from Trump’s ascension to power just how fragile our democracy is and how easily the pieces can fall into place to undermine our freedom. And we’ve learned how little many of us really care about that: Roughly 42 percent of eligible voters didn’t bother to show up for this election.
Solveig Torvik lives in Winthrop.
