The biggest moment of 2017 - Something Weird is Going On With Donald Trump's inauguration

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Published Jan 25, 2017

Is Donald Trump a “legitimate” president? Yes and no — it depends what we mean by that.

On strictly constitutional grounds, yeah, he won the election. But Trump's political legitimacy is highly dubious.

What makes this such a fraught debate, aside from the anger aroused in the election’s winner’s supporters as a result of some calling him illegitimate, is the nebulous nature of the charge and the way it has been thrown at Trump’s predecessors. In President Barack Obama’s case, for instance, conservatives liked to toss around the “illegitimate” charge by claiming he was not born in America or that ACORN had stuffed the ballot boxes — or some other nutty conspiracy theory. Such accusations are what Orin Kerr has called “a broader rhetorical strategy of delegitimizing those on the other side that has found a lot of currency on the political right since Obama was elected.”

In short, labeling a president “illegitimate” has become a little like calling all the news you don’t like “fake news.” You may not like a particular story on CNN, but that does not make it phony. So to call Trump illegitimate and not sound like the mirror image of the right-wing echo chamber, liberals need to make the distinction between political and legal legitimacy.

In legal terms, as defined under our Constitution, Trump is about to become the legitimate president. He won the majority of votes in the Electoral College, at which point the ball game was over. We can yell all we want about some of the factors beyond the control of Hillary Clinton’s campaign that went into Trump’s snagging some of these states’ votes. We can be angry about voter suppression laws that helped Trump win in some of those states that may still be judged unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the near future, for example. Or we can complain that Clinton was hurt by misinformation allegedly injected into the public sphere by a Russian propaganda campaign that influenced people to pull the lever for Trump.

But in the strictest legal sense, none of that matters. Under the conditions on the ground on Nov. 8 — rules understood by all parties in advance — Trump won the election. There is no constitutional avenue for doing over of the vote, and no court is going to strike down the result and install Clinton into office — even if John Lewis’ reasons for calling Trump illegitimate stem directly from the alleged Russian disinformation campaign.

In terms of his political legitimacy, however, Trump is on shakier ground — partly because this is a vaguer concept, but mostly because a president’s perceived legitimacy stems from a couple of different sources.

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The biggest moment of 2017 - Something Weird is Going On With Donald Trump's inauguration

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