These Republicans pointed to Clinton’s relatively slim margins of victory in key states like New Hampshire, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. Similarly, putative Senate moderates like Lindsey Graham and John McCain joined in to claim that Clinton’s win did not make her a legitimate president. Even so, Senator Mitch McConnell, once again relegated to being the minority leader, immediately argued that Clinton’s victory was tainted, saying that “Although I cannot quite believe that armed resistance is completely necessary right now, I can see the point of the people who do not want this woman-this unindicted criminal!-to be president.”Īlthough House Republicans voted to replace Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House, the new leadership immediately jumped on McConnell’s bandwagon. Republican leaders did not openly support Trump’s ultimately failed efforts to incite insurrection. For the first time, the Electoral College met in a secret, secure location. Trump, of course, said that the vote was rigged, and he called for massive resistance to the election results from his infamous “Second Amendment People.” Armed standoffs and brawls in Washington and other major cities led to mass arrests, and individual members of the Electoral College received death threats. It was not a rout, but it was a clear win for Democrats. Moreover, Democrats picked up five Senate seats, giving them 51 seats and allowing them to retake the majority, and they cut Republicans’ lead in the House of Representatives in half. Clinton won by four percentage points in the popular vote, and she won the Electoral College by more than one hundred votes, almost as wide a margin as Barack Obama enjoyed in 2012. This was especially surprising, because the election results were rather clear-cut. Republicans, unified in their hatred of the president-elect, quickly decided to try to use Trump’s dangerous antics to gain partisan advantage. Trump, freed from the last vestiges of restraint imposed by being a candidate, immediately followed through on his threat not to accept the results of the election. In our universe, however, the situation has been barely stable ever since Election Day. It would have been an odd and uncomfortable four years (or less), but no sober-minded person believes that Trump would have continued to be the unhinged demagogue that he opportunistically portrayed in the campaign. A unified, bipartisan cadre of public-spirited congressional leaders would have controlled the accidental president. Moreover, Republicans would never have allowed Trump free rein to fill his cabinet with unqualified hacks or to commit impeachable offenses. Had he won, after all, Trump would surely have grown up and stopped issuing baseless tweets, leaving behind his scorched-earth tactics as he came to appreciate the gravity of his office. People who have tried to say that a hypothetical President Trump would have caused even more insanity are hard-pressed to come up with believable narratives of a country in serious turmoil. At the end of President Hillary Clinton’s first one hundred days in office, the possibilities for sober governance look farther away than ever-even though the president herself has been a model of restraint and coolness under immense pressure. The election of America’s first woman president brought with it an unimaginable amount of chaos and strife. Dateline: April 30, 2017, Washington, elsewhere in the multiverse
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |