President Trump has accused the Democratic Party of corrupting the integrity of the 2016 presidential election.
That the same media pundits screaming about this now are also deathly silent about failed gubernatorial candidates Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum, both of whom claimed baselessly just last week that their respective elections actually were stolen in 2018 by the GOP, is just an oversight, I’m sure.
On Sunday, the president tweeted the following note:
The “insurance policy” bit is a reference to former FBI agent Peter Strzok, the anti-Trump partisan who used to be connected to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The president’s “ballot box” comment is a reference to his oft-repeated claim he lost the popular vote in 2016 because Democrats encouraged roughly three million “illegals” to vote. Nothing comes close to corroborating this assertion.
The regular resistance pundits have been quick to push back on the president’s tweet.
“Deeply corrosive to democracy to have the president suggest that the opposition party tried to steal the election,” opined political scientist and New York Times contributor Brendan Nyhan.
Self-proclaimed expert and frequent cable news commentator Tom Nichols lectured elsewhere: “The President of United States is putting ‘ballot box’ in scare quotes and attacking the legitimacy of an election he won. This is dangerous behavior, in every way, and Republicans have decided that they’re going to accept it because of judges and tax cuts.”
The Washington Post’s formerly conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin theorized darkly, “Why [Trump] would put ballot box in quotes is unknown, but it’s of a piece with his efforts to discredit democratic elections, a habit that neatly dovetails with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort to undermine Western democracies.”
And so on and so on and so on and so on and so on.
They’re not wrong to criticize the president’s tweet, though perhaps it’s possible to do it with less melodrama. We should demand better from our president. We should also demand the same from other political figures, including failed Democratic candidates Abrams and Gillum, who are still claiming to this day that they would’ve won their respective races last year in Georgia and Florida were it not for the GOP’s dastardly election-stealing tricks.
“[H]ad we been able to legally count every one of those votes not just in Florida but also in Georgia, I wonder what the outcome may be,” Gillum said this weekend on HBO’s “Real Time.”
Abrams, meanwhile, bragged last Thursday that she has yet to concede her race, telling an interviewer, “I did win my election. I just didn’t get to have the job.”
Like Trump, nothing comes close to supporting their separate assertions they lost due to Republican shenanigans at the ballot box. Georgia’s then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp beat Abrams last year with 50.2 percent of the vote compared to her 48.8 percent. In Florida, the race was much tighter. Gillum lost to Gov. Ron DeSantis 49.6 to 49.2 percent. Close, to be sure, but not close enough, as the simultaneous U.S. Senate race was, to leave the outcome in doubt.
Weirdly enough, many of the same commentators who are very upset this week about Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2016 election have still said nothing about Abrams or Gillum doing the same last week for the 2018 gubernatorial races. Neither Nyhan, nor Nichols, nor Rubin has so much as tweeted about Abrams’ and Gillum’s remarks. In fact, the only comment that any of the cited resistance pundits have had in regard to either of the failed gubernatorial candidates has come from Rubin, who tweeted last week: “Abrams/Kasich 2020.”
I understand there’s a large gap between the president of the United States and two washed up gubernatorial candidates casting doubt on the integrity of our electoral mechanisms. But either we oppose public figures seeking to undermine confidence in our elections, or we don’t. Protecting democracy means defending it from all attackers, not just the ones with an “R” next to their name.
