The Fundamental Legitimacy of Donald Trump
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into links between Russia and the president’s campaign could have turned out so much worse for Donald Trump. It almost seemed certain that it would. But it didn’t. The end of the Mueller investigation has now made hollow the maximalist charges of collusion against Trump and his team.
The collusion claim was an indirect—or direct—way of saying that Donald Trump was illegitimately elected. For Mueller’s team to stop short of concluding that collusion had occurred, then, was the best possible result for American democracy. Citizens should be relieved, not disappointed, when the legitimacy of election outcomes is strengthened, however much we dislike them.
Conspiracy with Russia wasn’t the only thing that commentators—both liberals and Never Trump conservatives—got wrong, though. There was another, related charge that was graver and, on its face, more implausible: that Trump would (or could) destroy American democracy. And he would do so with the help of his Russian enablers. Here, the two claims came together—that the Russians wished to end the American experiment and that Trump provided the vehicle for their ambitious designs.
This was part of a grand narrative. But what if the narrative of American democracy under mortal threat—with or without Russian help—was fundamentally flawed from the very start?
[Read: Will Donald Trump destroy the presidency?]
Grand narratives are appealing because they help us comprehend the incomprehensible. In this case, they helped to make sense of the endless shock of Donald Trump’s victory. The democracy-is-doomed
