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A NEW YORK TIMES EMBARRASSMENT. On Monday evening, the Times’ Paul Krugman posted a column declaring that when Joe Biden becomes president, “he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge.” The challenge, Krugman said, is that Biden will be “the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy.”
Krugman seemed to anticipate that some would respond that some Democrats refused to accept Donald Trump’s legitimacy. But that never happened, Krugman claimed. “And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate,” he wrote, “just that he was incompetent and dangerous.”
Does anyone at the New York Times read Krugman’s column before it’s published? Of course some Democrats said Trump was illegitimate. Hillary Clinton said so last year. “He [Trump] knows he’s an illegitimate president,” Clinton told CBS’s “60 Minutes” on September 29, 2019.
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And it started much earlier than that. On January 16, 2017, when Trump had been in office less than a week, a senior House Democrat, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, conceded to CNN that Trump had been “legally elected,” but argued that the Russian attempt to interfere in the 2016 campaign “makes his election illegitimate.”
Then there was Rep. John Lewis. On January 13, 2017, a week before Trump took the oath of office, the late Democratic icon said of Trump, “I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president.” Lewis refused to attend Trump’s inauguration, leading a number of other House Democrats — close to 20 of them, including Nadler — to boycott the inauguration as well, saying they wanted to “stand with” Lewis. Given Lewis’s stature in the Democratic Party, and in the country as a whole, his comments sparked an extensive discussion on the question of Trump’s legitimacy.
Among those taking part in that discussion was…Paul Krugman. “Let’s ask whether Mr. Lewis was right to say what he said,” Krugman wrote in the Times on January 16, 2017. “Is it OK, morally and politically, to declare the man about to move into the White House illegitimate? Yes, it is. In fact, it’s an act of patriotism.”
So Democrats did, in fact, say that Trump was illegitimate. And Paul Krugman not only knew of such statements, he cheered them on at the time. And now Krugman writes, “Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate.” Oh, come on.
In Trump’s first year in office, there was widespread debate about whether he was a legitimate president. On March 18, 2017, the Associated Press reported that a recent poll found that “a majority of young adults — 57 percent — see Trump’s presidency as illegitimate.”
The talk never went away. In May, 2019, at a campaign event in New Hampshire, a woman told candidate Joe Biden that Trump was “an illegitimate president, in my mind…he’s illegitimate.” Biden responded, “Look, folks, I absolutely agree.” He jokingly asked if she would be his running mate.
In June, 2019, former President Jimmy Carter suggested that Trump owed his election to Russian interference. When his interviewer asked whether that meant Trump was an illegitimate president, Carter agreed.
So there it is: John Lewis. Jerrold Nadler. A group of Democratic lawmakers. Hillary Clinton. Jimmy Carter. And Joe Biden himself, the next Democratic president. How many Democrats have to call Trump illegitimate before Paul Krugman recognizes that they called Trump illegitimate?
The attempt to throw it all down the memory hole is more than just an embarrassment for Krugman and the New York Times. It also encourages a sense of grievance — They won’t accept Biden’s legitimacy! — that is utterly ignorant of recent events. Some Democrats not only declared Donald Trump an illegitimate president before he was even sworn in — they spent the next years trying to remove him from office, abusing the powers of investigation in the hope that even if he survived he would be so weakened that he could not win re-election. No one should forget — or ignore — what happened.
