My two favorite Americans used to be the gambler Arnold Rothstein and the 37th President Richard Nixon; one because he fixed a world series and the other because he fixed a Presidential election. But while Rothstein still gets the nod as one of my favorites, Nixon may have to move over for the 45th, who it is now being said may have fixed what happened last November 8th.
Ans this isn’t my idea — it is the belief of none other than the New York Times, which published an op-ed today from Charles Blow, which states that the issues swirling around the connection of his campaign to the Russians need to be fully investigated in order to determine whether his Presidency is legitimate or not.
Now I’m no Constitutional scholar but neither is Charles Blow. On the other hand, we both know how to read English and I can’t find anything in the U.S. Constitution or the U.S. Code that says an election isn’t legitimized because someone working for a particular candidate (or the candidate himself/herself) talked to anyone at all.
As far as I know, the only event that could de-legitimize an election is whether there was any voter fraud. And in the case of this particular election, the only person who is claiming fraud happens to be the guy who won! And even if it were to turn out that HRC got a couple of million phantom votes, it wouldn’t change the outcome of the election because losing popular votes wouldn’t increase her electoral count which fell well short of the 270 that she needed to win.
Obviously if contacts between Trump associates or surrogates and Russians resulted in the breaking of laws, these contacts need to be investigated, particularly if those individuals are now part of Trump’s Executive team. But if every, single one of those guys (Stone, Flynn, Sessions, et. al.) who are suspected of talking to the Russkies roll over and admit that they did open their mouths when they should have kept their mouths shut, this doesn’t alter the electoral results one bit.
There are plenty of reasons to be pissed off at the tone and contents of the governing style of President Trump. And there’s no reason why a national, resist-Trump movement shouldn’t continue to grow and build. I, for one, hope it does. But let’s resist Trump for the right reasons and let’s stop inventing some kind of legal short-cut as a substitute for sustained, credible, hard work. The dumping of emails by WikiLeaks may have persuaded some people to change how they were going to vote. But Trump’s the President because he won the election, and no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that.