As Orwell memorably put it, sometimes the “restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” In that spirit, The Scrapbook will reiterate to our liberal friends: Donald Trump is going to be president of the United States. We don’t have high hopes that they’re listening to us, however. Consider the sequence of events since November 8.
First, Democrats pushed futile recount efforts in three states in the hopes, apparently, of some kind of divine intervention. The effort was spearheaded by the Green party, but Hillary Clinton aides participated in the recount in Wisconsin and were quietly supportive otherwise. Trump actually gained votes in Wisconsin, the one state where a recount was completed. The only thing notable about the Michigan and Pennsylvania recounts was that we learned 37 percent of Detroit’s precincts counted more ballots than the number of voters reported by poll workers.
When that ridiculous effort failed, Democrats moved on to the next target: the Electoral College. To hear liberals tell it these days, the Electoral College is almost as sinister as the Fugitive Slave Act. Given the fact that they’ve spent the last year feting Alexander Hamilton on Broadway as an enlightened proto-liberal, they seem to be suffering cognitive dissonance regarding the man’s contribution to the brilliant invention that preserved federalism in national elections, lest we all be ruled by the whims of voters in California.
Obama, in a classic display of the quasi-royal arrogance that will not be missed, declared at a recent press conference that “the Electoral College is a vestige, it’s a carryover from an earlier vision of how our federal government was going to work that put a lot of premium on states.” We’ll side with Hamilton here, thank you very much.
The disparaging of the Electoral College had to be briefly put on hold, of course, lest it get in the way of flattering and seducing the electors. Liberals want to get their way now. So without pausing a nanosecond to reflect on the hypocrisy of what they were about to do, they suddenly decided that the Electoral College was an important safeguard to keep irrational hoi polloi from installing a crazy despot. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig made the astonishing claim that as many as 20 Republican electors were considering voting against Trump. Electors were both cajoled and harassed as part of a highly organized campaign that the media treated as if it were an honest-to-God grassroots effort. Cable news hounds dined out on the breathless drama in the days before the electors cast their ballots.
Well, the Electoral College came and went, Trump won handily, and in one of those delicious ironies, more electors defected from Clinton than from Trump. At that point, humiliated Clinton aides blasted the silly effort—one even terming it a “coup attempt.” But this was disingenuous. Days after the vote, Politico reported that Clinton aides had been working behind the scenes on the obviously doomed effort to provoke an Electoral College revolt. We shudder to think what a national scandal it would have been if the shoe had been on the other foot, with Trump aides and supporters blowing millions of dollars on pointless recounts and efforts to subvert the Electoral College, lest Hillary become president.
The Scrapbook well understands that people are nervous about a Trump presidency and sympathizes up to a point. But here’s some free advice for our liberal friends: If holding President Trump accountable is even half as important as you say, you can’t spend the next four years acting just as petulant as you imagine him to be.
