Today Secretary Robert Reich, in an email message to Move On members, stated that "Donald Trump is the most illegitimate president in American history."
Here’s what I would say to Secretary Reich.
First of all, Secretary Reich, that is not accurate. There is no question that Trump lost the popular vote. However there is also very little question that he won a sufficient number of swing states to win in the Electoral College. And our president is chosen through the Electoral College, not the popular vote. That is an undemocratic system; it disenfranchises urban areas and the more populous states. It needs to be changed. But, for now, them's are the rules and them's are the reasons why Trump legitimately became our next president.
In recent times, the only illegitimately elected president was George W. Bush, and then only in 2000, not in 2004, when he legitimately won re-election. In 2000, there is clear evidence that a full and fair recount of the state of Florida would have given those electoral votes, and the presidency, to Al Gore. Gore's legal team made the bad call to contest only one area in Florida rather than the whole state, a call which was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, effectively handing the presidency to Bush. But that does not change the fact that, on the merits, Gore was probably our legitimately elected president in 2000.
But that's not the only reason why depictions of Trump as an illegitimate president need to be challenged.
Back in 2008 Obama's opponents mounted a full-throated campaign, in the wake of his election, intended to de-legitimize and "otherize" his presidency. That effort was a clear and flagrant attempt to subvert the democratic process. Should progressives and liberals now engage in the same sort of anti-democratic subversion? It would be outrageous if we did so.
Finally, terming Trump an illegitimate president is also a pathetic attempt for the Democratic party to evade its responsibility for this disaster. The fact is that years ago, back in 2013 (and, it could be argued, as far back as 2007), there were plenty of us who recognized that Hillary Clinton, with her very high negatives and her history of support for war and closeness with Wall Street, would be a very weak, terribly flawed presidential candidate for 2016. Many of us recognized that Barack Obama had won the presidency, not once but twice, with a younger, browner, more progressive, better-educated coalition than that on which Clinton Inc.'s victories were based way back in the 90's.
Recklessly ignoring the lessons of the twin Obama victories in 08 and 12, the powers-that-be in the Democratic party decided it was time to go back to the future with someone whose history, whether on the Iraq War or criminal justice, whether on gay rights or financial regulation, was a terrible fit with the Obama Coalition. So Barack Obama gave us this wonderful gift of a winning presidential coalition, and we cavalierly threw it away like so much trash.
Not enough of us tried our damnedest to nudge our party away from walking off that cliff, whether it was by pushing for a principled and charismatic alternative like Elizabeth Warren in 2014, pushing for Joe Biden to get into the race when he briefly considered it in 2015 or, finally, in desperation, in 2016, getting behind the Hail Mary pass of a septuagenarian avowed socialist with a Brooklyn accent in a last frantic attempt to derail the suicidal Clinton train. Unfortunately our attempts were insufficient to dissuade the party from its self-destructive course.
So make no mistake about it: Donald Trump was legitimately elected as the 45th president of the United States. He was elected thanks to the monumental cluelessness and boundless idiocy of a Democratic party which actually got it into its thick skull that nominating a candidate with the highest negatives of any Democratic presidential candidate in history was somehow, by these idiots' twisted logic, a really neat idea.
History is cruel and ruthless; Democrats, progressives and liberals briskly marched off that cliff, and managed to miraculously lose a race against Donald Trump, an ignorant bigot and demagogue with clear tendencies toward narcissism and self-delusion. We did this to ourselves, no one else. If you're looking for someone to blame, look in the mirror.