Why Are You Surprised Trump Won't Respect the Res

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Why Are You Surprised Trump Won't Respect the Results of the Election?

It's been the Republican way for 25 years.

It has been an article of faith for the entire Republican Party for a quarter-century now that any elected Democratic president is prima facie illegitimate.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
OCT 20, 2016

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA—You know, I've never been to Fatima, but I watched Sean Hannity Wednesday night when he was surrounded by the two Trump spalpeens, so I figure I'm covered.

And I confess I didn't know that Hillary Rodham Clinton was so effective at wielding what the old boxing guys would call a "sneaky right hand."

But the "takeaway," as we say in the pundit game, was what Donald Trump said, or didn't say, about "respecting" the results of the election. Good lord, people were fighting for space on the fainting couch all day on Thursday, too, and likely will be for the foreseeable future.

Can we stop with the civics class pieties, please? Yes, what Donald Trump said on Wednesday night about keeping us all "in suspense" as to whether he'd "accept" the results of the presidential election was a great soundbite and an easy way to emphasize further the fact that the Republican Party has nominated a petulant child for president.

But enough with the shocked faces from the pundits who drape themselves in imaginary togas and weep on cue for this assault on the fragile American democracy. This is nothing new.

Since 1992, the country has elected Democratic candidates for the presidency four times. In every case, the organized Republican Party, especially its legislative elements, and especially some of the people who are now horrified that It's All Come To This, have refused to "respect" the results of the election.

(Lindsey Graham, in particular, can sip from a fine goblet of STFU.)

After Bill Clinton was first elected, then-Senator Bob Dole said that it was his job to represent the people who hadn't voted for the president. When Bill Clinton was elected the second time, the organized Republican Party respected the results of the election so deeply that it tried to throw the president so elected out of office.

When Barack Obama was elected, members of the Republican establishment respected his election so profoundly that they all met the night of the inauguration to plan how to stymie the policies for which the country had voted.

Some of this was pure partisanship, but most of it is far beyond that. If you need further elaboration on that, I suggest you take it up with Judge Merrick Garland. He seems to have some time on his hands.

What they weren't doing is respecting the result of an election.

The constant drumbeat concerning phantom "voter fraud" is a function of delegitimizing the electoral process and, therefore, the elections therein. It's no accident that this drumbeat, and the campaign of voter-suppression out in the states that followed hard on it, began when the country had the audacity to elect a black man president.

While it is an effort to suppress votes, it's also a safety valve in case that effort somehow doesn't work. Hell, Birtherism itself was a way to avoid respecting the results of an election.

And also, enough, please, with the pious references to what a statesman Al Gore was in 2000. There simply was no way the Republican Party—including its judicial auxiliary in Washington, D.C.—was going to allow Gore to be president.

A hired mob of Republican staffers shut down a legal recount in Dade County and, a few months later, most of them were loudly applauded for having done so at a gala dinner in honor of Washington's conservative elite.

Failing to respect the result of a presidential election—indeed, conspiring to obstruct a fair counting of the votes—wasn't considered a mortal sin against the Founders back then. Instead, it was a helluva career move.

(And, not for nothing, but that moment in the Senate when no Democratic senator would stand with any member of the House to contest the certification of the election remains one of the more nauseating spectacles in American political history.)

It has been an article of faith for the entire Republican Party for a quarter-century now that any elected Democratic president is prima facie illegitimate. Trump is just putting a layer of narcissistic varnish on the bucket containing all the historical deplorables.

Further, the history of the country is replete with efforts, some of them violent, by politicians to avoid "respecting" the results of election. (Check out the years 1876-77, although that was in reaction to a presidential election that was utterly unworthy of respect.

We've had a few of those, too.)

We had a civil war because 13 states didn't "respect the election" of Abraham Lincoln. And that fact is not mitigated in the least by the nice words spoken by Stephen A. Douglas in the aftermath, when he declined to respond to losing by joining the Army of Northern Virginia. That's a fairy tale.

Donald Trump is just being a little cruder about things than many of our television historians would like. Democracy is not a bedtime story, but the monsters within it are very, very real.

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