Americans have seen the last four presidents as illegitimate. Here’s why.
It's tempting to see the entirety of Donald Trump's story as unprecedented, but is the fourth consecutive president to assume the office with a segment of the electorate questioning his legitimacy. On that score, Trump doesn't represent a new crisis for American democracy but rather an escalation of one that's been building - one that we've all played a role in creating and that he has deftly exploited to his advantage.
We used to argue over whether new presidents had a “mandate,” which was a more polite way of raising the legitimacy question. After the 1992 election, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole said President-elect Bill Clinton didn't have a mandate to press ahead with any sweeping changes because he'd obtained only 43 percent of the popular vote in a three-way race. Republicans convinced themselves that third-party candidate Ross Perot had cost them the election, taking more votes away from George H.W. Bush than from Clinton. They were quick to accuse Clinton in his first year of liberal overreach for pressing to allow gays in the military, raise energy taxes and take on an ambitious overhaul of the health care system. Anger among conservatives that Clinton would illegitimately (in their view) push such an agenda led to the so-called Gingrich Revolution in 1994 and fed any number of conspiracy theories and led Republicans to gleefully pursue Clinton's impeachment during his second term.
Then in 2000 came one of the more contentious presidential elections in U.S. history - not because of the substance of the campaign between Al Gore and George W. Bush, two amiable and seemingly moderate candidates, but because the result was too close to call for weeks. It took a U.S. Supreme Court intervention to put an end to the indecision. Compounding the muddled nature of the outcome, Bush obtained half a million fewer votes in the popular count nationwide. Some members of the Congressional Black Caucus (including Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who forcefully questioned Trump's legitimacy this past week) refused to attend the inauguration. I can remember all the debates then among fellow journalists and friends about either the necessity, or the peril, of “normalizing” such an abnormal, unsatisfying result with a “normal” inauguration and all the other trappings afforded an incoming president.
We tend to forget the extent to which #notmypresident could have been a trending hashtag in those early Bush days - if hashtags had been around - because everything would soon change, on Sept. 11, 2001. After the terrorist attacks, Americans rallied around their president, as we always tend to do in wartime, and the grousing about his legitimacy or mandate stopped. But a few years later, with mounting disillusionment over open-ended military campaigns abroad and a sense that the administration had launched the Iraq invasion on false pretenses, millions of Americans once again began to question not only Bush's judgment but also his legitimacy. None other than New York real estate tycoon Donald Trump called for Bush's impeachment.
The impulse to disqualify, rather than merely debate, leaders we don't agree with intensified in the late 2000s. There was no disputing the mandate conferred upon Barack Obama by his resounding 2008 win, so the questioning of our first African American president's legitimacy swirled around the underhanded, racially motivated and absurd allegations - peddled by our new president, among others - that Obama wasn't a natural-born citizen. Newt Gingrich spoke for many in 2010 when he accused the president of being beyond the American mainstream, pursuing instead a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview.
Given our propensity to question the legitimacy of leaders we don't agree with, it's hardly surprising Lewis and others began questioning Trump's legitimacy before he took the oath. The tenor of his public rhetoric and behavior; his considerable 3 million-vote deficit in the popular vote; the FBI director's erratic intervention, now under investigation, in the final days of the campaign; and the Russian government's attempts to influence the outcome in Trump's favor provide fodder for those inclined to dismiss a president they oppose. Trump has taken to calling “fake news” any news he doesn't like, but for millions of Americans he is about to become their “fake president.”
What is it about the past three presidencies that helped bring us to this moment? That question will no doubt inspire many dissertations in the coming decades, but one obvious similarity is that the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, unlike those that came before them, had to navigate in a political environment shaped by the close of the Cold War, the rise of instantaneous, doomsday-style political fundraising, the emergence of a highly balkanized and ubiquitous 24/7 media and the disruption of traditional politics by the Internet and social media.
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