Many in the national press have taken on the role of discrediting President-elect Trump’s victory, just days before the Electoral College is set to meet and officially make Trump the next president of the United States.
Because of mounting evidence that Russian hackers stole the emails of Democratic leaders and the FBI’s public condemnation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said the election was “illegitimate.”
“So this was a tainted election,” he said in an op-ed this week. “It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement.”
Last weekend on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” liberal Slate writer Jamelle Bouie also said the hacking had cast a shadow on Trump’s win, rendering it a farce.
“I’m sort of in this place right now where I’m not entirely sure, beyond investigations, beyond sort of serious scrutiny of this, what we do about this, because it really is unprecedented,” he said. “And … if it is true, if we have further verification of this, then what it suggests potentially is that the election was in some sense illegitimate. And I don’t know where you go from there.”
Despite recounts in some battleground states, Trump has maintained his electoral victory, even as he lost the nationwide popular vote. Still, the Daily Beast published an analysis last Sunday by contributor Alan Gilbert under the headline, “How Do We Know Our Elections Are Fair?”
The piece argued that early exit polling favored Clinton, leading many to believe she was headed for a win, and thus should cast doubt on the outcome. “In any other country, the U.S. State Department would declare the presidential election results a hoax,” it said.
Others have argued that when the Electoral College electors convene Monday to secure the results, they should consider rebuking Trump and withhold their vote from him. Liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne said Wednesday that during the transition period, Trump has proven himself unfit for the office, and that the Electoral College should remedy the situation.
“If Trump takes office, it’s the electoral-college system that will do it,” he wrote. “And the post-election Trump has been as abusive and self-involved as he was during the campaign. The opposition’s job is to stand up and prevent or mitigate the damage he could do to our country.”
“They can argue, fairly, that rejecting Trump would threaten the stability of our institutions,” he added. “But the threat Trump himself presents to those institutions is why electors need to think hard before they make this decision.”
Dionne’s colleague at the Post, right-leaning columnist Kathleen Parker, argued the same in a Dec. 7 op-ed.
“If there are 37 Republicans among [the electors] with the courage to perform their moral duty and protect the nation from a talented but dangerous president-elect, a new history of heroism will have to be written,” she said. “Please, be brave.”
