Americans have seen the last four presidents as illegitimate
A dangerous new trend in political attack.
It’s tempting to see the entirety of Donald Trump’s story as unprecedented, but when he is sworn in today as the nation’s 45th president, he will be our fourth consecutive leader to assume the office with a segment of the electorate questioning his legitimacy. On that score, Trump doesn’t represent a new crisis for American democracy but rather an escalation of one that’s been building — one that we’ve all played a role in creating and that he has deftly exploited to his advantage.
We used to argue over whether new presidents had a “mandate,” which was a more polite way of raising the legitimacy question. After the 1992 election, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole said President-elect Bill Clinton
did not have a mandate to press ahead with any sweeping changes because he’d obtained only 43 percent of the popular vote in a three-way race. Republicans convinced themselves that third-party candidate Ross Perot had cost them the election, taking more votes away from George H.W. Bush than from Clinton. They were quick to
accuse Clinton in his first year of liberal overreach for pressing to allow gays in the military, raise energy taxes and take on an ambitious overhaul of the healthcare system. Anger among conservatives that Clinton would illegitimately (in their view) push such an agenda led to the so-called Gingrich Revolution in 1994, fed any number of conspiracy theories and led Republicans to gleefully pursue Clinton’s impeachment during his second term.
Then in 2000 came one of the more contentious presidential elections in U.S. history — not because of the substance of the campaign between Al Gore and George W. Bush, two amiable and seemingly moderate candidates, but because the result was too close to call for weeks. It took a Supreme Court intervention to put an end to the indecision. Compounding the muddled nature of the outcome, Bush
obtained half a million fewer votes in the popular count nationwide. Some members of the Congressional Black Caucus (
including Rep. John Lewis, who forcefully
questioned Trump’s legitimacy this past week) refused to attend the inauguration. I can remember all the debates then among fellow journalists and friends about either the necessity, or the peril, of “normalizing” such an abnormal, unsatisfying result with a “normal” inauguration and all the other trappings afforded an incoming president.
We tend to forget the extent to which #notmypresident could have been a trending hashtag in those early Bush days — if hashtags had been around — because everything would soon change, on Sept. 11, 2001. After the terrorist attacks, Americans rallied around their president, as we always tend to do in wartime, and the grousing about his legitimacy or mandate stopped. But a few years later, with mounting disillusionment over open-ended military campaigns abroad and a sense that the administration had launched the Iraq invasion on false pretenses, millions of Americans once again began to question not only Bush’s judgment but also his legitimacy. None other than New York real estate tycoon Donald Trump
called for Bush’s impeachment.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/post...llegitimate-heres-why/?utm_term=.2e8c81bc14f6
