http://www.usatoday.com/story/opini...ts-democrats-jonathan-turley-column/96669492/
Trump is our president: Jonathan Turley
In the end, the protests are not about legitimacy.
It is inaugural week and Washington is again the rallying point for hundreds of thousands of people. Indeed, my house in McLean, Virginia is hosting roughly a dozen people from Illinois and Florida. They are not, however, coming to celebrate but to protest. My brother Chris, his family, and various friends will be joining thousands protesting the inauguration and then will join the “
Women’s March.” I will not be joining them. While I fully support their exercise of free speech and share some of their concerns, I believe that this week is about celebrating the
71st time that a democratically elected president has taken the oath of office (and our
58th formal inauguration). I was highly critical of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the campaign. However, there is a time to protest and there is a time to come together, even if only for an inaugural ceremony.
Over 50 Democratic members of Congress have publicly announced that they will not attend the inauguration, including some like Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who has insisted that Trump is
not the legitimate president. (Lewis and other members also boycotted George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001 because they insisted that he was not
the true elected president.) Ironically, many of these members were the same people joining Hillary Clinton in denouncing the “horrifying” notion that Trump or his supporters might not accept the results of the election. Clinton decried how Trump, by not stating that he would accept the results of losing, he was “denigrating — he is
talking down our democracy.” That was when Clinton was viewed as a shoe-in. Then came election night.
After the election,
Clinton joined others in challenging results in key states and Democrats began to question the legitimacy of the election — first due to the fact that Trump lost the popular vote and later based on
Russian hacking of Democratic emails.
It is of course immaterial that Trump lost the popular vote in a system based on electoral, not popular voting. (For the record, I have long been a critic of the Electoral College.) Moreover, while references to the “Russian hacking of the election” have become common shorthand, the Russians did not hack the
election. Emails were hacked and those emails were not
faked or tampered with, as repeatedly claimed by DNC chair Donna Brazile. As recently confirmed by the
intelligence report, they were real emails showing incredibly dishonest and corrupt practices. Although there is no question that the leak appears selective in targeting Democrats, Washington seems most aggrieved by the fact that the public was given a true insight into the false and duplicitous behavior that defines the establishment. However, according to a new CNN/ORC poll, the spin is not taking:
almost 60% of voters do not believe the hacking determined the outcome of the election.
In the end, the protests are not about legitimacy. Trump is by any measure our duly elected and legitimate president. It is about a refusal to accept legitimate results. Even the title of “The Women’s March” is dubious.
(USA Today for the win.)
