whether President Trump committed offenses justifying conviction and disqualification from future officeholding. For the reasons given above, the answer to that question is indisputably “yes.”
C. Election Results
President Trump may persist in asserting that he actually won the 2020 presidential election, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary—and despite the rejection of this claim by every court and election official to consider it. President Trump may also suggest that his abuse of office is somehow justified or excused by his belief that the election was “rigged.” Any such argument would rest upon demonstrable falsehoods about the legitimacy of the election results.
Moreover, we live in a Nation governed by the rule of law, not mob violence incited by candidates who cannot accept their own defeat. President Trump was not the first Presidential candidate who declared himself cheated out of victory.[1] Andrew Jackson, for instance, strongly believed that the 1824 election had been stolen from him because powerful forces refused to accept his candidacy on behalf of the common man. Richard Nixon believed in 1960 that he had been cheated out of the Presidency by widespread voter fraud in Illinois, which he thought secured John F. Kennedy’s victory. And in 2000, Vice President Al Gore and many of his political supporters thought he would have won the Presidency had all of Florida’s votes been properly counted. Yet despite their feelings of grievance, all of these Presidential candidates accepted the election results and acquiesced to the peaceful transfer of power required by the Constitution. President Trump, alone in our Nation’s history, did not. His belief that he won the election—regardless of its truth or falsity (though it is assuredly false)—is no defense at all for his abuse of office.
- ↑ For the discussion in this paragraph, see generally Robert Mitchell, A Presidential Election History Lesson: Americans Often Waited Days Or Weeks For The Outcome, Wash. Post (Nov. 4, 2020).
