ujm – you are on record here advocating for an anti-democratic use of constitutional power to throw the election to trump simply because it can be done under the literal reading of the constitution (in mark levin’s reading of the constitution). So in the final analysis, ENS is correct: be honest and acknowledge that you want an authoritarian regime.
Further, Hillary Clinton never claimed that Trump did not legally hold the office of the president or that legal actions he took as president would be illegitimate. She did not claim russia hacked the vote counting machines or that the election itself was illegitimate. Whatever people have in their heads when they vote is their business; there is a long history of propaganda and disinformation in presidential campaigns, but in the end it’s up to the campaigns to make their cases and then people vote using whatever criteria they want to use.
The question of legitimacy in 2016 had to do with democratic norms and whether the trump campaign accepted or colluded with foreign powers. Had the Russia investigation concluded that there was actual collusion, there may have been grounds for impeachment, but no one ever said collusion would void the 2016 election. Trump’s legal legitimacy was never questioned. Hillary Clinton never claimed she was rightful president. She conceded as soon as the results were clear. So stop with the false equivalencies.
What’s going on now is either trump trying to maneuver the country into a serious constitutional crisis, or far more likely, he’s a wimp who cannot admit defeat so he’s just lashing out without a strategy, or even more likely than that, it’s a huge con to fire up the trump zombies to get them to pay for his campaign debts and legal fees. Trump has every right to ask for every vote to be counted, to ask for a recount where allowed by law, and to ask for the minor voting irregularities to be looked into, but he does not have a right to claim widespread fraud without any proof. Whatever the motivation, it will have a long lasting affect on democracy and will serve to delegitimize actions taken by biden in eyes of those trump supporters who cannot separate fact from fiction.