Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Friday, November 13, 2020

No, Trump Had No Right To Sue

 Eugene Robinson is right that Trump's right to sue everyone and everything over his election loss is not real. He and so many others are right that Trump is doing lasting damage to our ideas about the legitimacy of elections.

There was a pervasive fear among anyone to the left of Mitt Romney that Trump would somehow eek out another narrow win in the Electoral College while getting swamped in the popular vote. As of this morning, Biden has a 5,000,000 vote lead with 50.8% of the vote - a better result than Reagan had in 1980; Trump has managed to win only 47.4% of the vote.  Still, flip about 60,000 votes in the right states and Trump wins reelection. 

If that had happened we would be having a real crisis in our democracy. A man would have been elected president twice without coming close to sniffing a popular vote victory. It would be difficult for Blue States to reconcile their disenfranchisement in the presidency with our attachment to America. 

Instead, we got a clear electoral mandate for Biden. This election was not close.

Republicans pretending that it was - and it's pretty clear that they are pretending - is because they fear and need the Deplorables. While it seems that resistance is eroding and Trump is talking about a run in 2024, the damage is done.

It's amazing no one has been killed yet.

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