The popular vote tally is interesting but irrelevant – neither Trump nor Clinton campaigned to win the meaningless popular vote, but aimed to win in the Electoral College, the one that actually counted. Trump could have surely campaigned differently and cut into Clinton’s four-million vote margin in California, if the popular vote was how the election would have been decided. One can’t superimpose new rules after the game has been played and declare an alternate winner.
“So this was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement.
The question now is what to do with that horrifying knowledge in the months and years ahead.”
(This is actually a step back from the ledge from where Krugman was a couple of weeks after the election, when heforwarded on Twitter a left-wing conspiracy theory about how Trump stole the election: “OK, this is terrifying,” he wrote, linking to a shoddy, soon-to-be-utterly discredited study claiming, according to the headline of the equally gullible New York magazine, “Experts Urge Clinton Campaign to Challenge Election Results in 3 Swing States.”) – READ MORE
