CNN
Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu
Everything Donald Trump has done since losing the election has validated fears that a second term would have deeply imperiled American democracy. Enraged by his loss, the President is debasing the notion that elections are free and fair -- a fundamental underpinning of a political system based on consent.
Trump has tried to corrupt the electoral system by pressuring local officials to subvert the vote outcome. He exposed others to threats of violence by stoking conspiracy theories about electoral processes they oversaw. He persuaded more than 120 members of the House of Representatives to join his effort to contradict American voters. And after years of working to bend the justice system to his whims, he is considering firing even his loyal Attorney General William Barr for recognizing the election was fair.
The President insults truth itself when he claims that he won landslides in states where he clearly lost big, like Pennsylvania and Michigan. He has made a mockery of the US court system with a string of frivolous suits. And now he’s turning on the conservative Supreme Court majority that he himself built, because it wouldn't even consider his absurd but dangerous effort to ignore millions of votes. Meanwhile, he’s ignoring the terrible rising toll of a pandemic that is now worse than it has ever been, after months of acting in a way that almost certainly means more people will get sick and die.
Trump did not just set out to destroy confidence in the election to assuage his own embarrassment at losing. As he pointed out in a Fox News interview at the weekend — he’s taking revenge by harming his rightful successor. “I worry about the country having an illegitimate president,” he said.
The courts have thwarted Trump’s unprecedented effort to crush American democracy. He will be gone in 37 days. But the damage is already done to Americans’ trust in their political system and in the US presidency itself.
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