Are Trump's Opponents a "Resistance"?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Hillary Clinton described herself as “part of the resistance” during an interview with the CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour on May 2.

She also continues to refuse to accept her defeat in last year’s presidential election, blaming her loss on interference by then FBI Director James Comey and Russian hackers. As far as she’s concerned, she didn’t lose; the election was in effect “stolen.”

“I was on the way to winning,” she contended, until the combination of Comey’s letter on October 28 to Congress informing it that he had reopened the bureau’s investigation into her use of a private e-mail server, and the Russian WikiLeaks, “raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off.”

Comey addressed this at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on May 3. Clinton’s e-mails, containing classified information, were being forwarded to former Congressman Anthony Weiner by his wife Huma Abedin, a top aide to Clinton, he explained. Actually, most were simply backed up onto his computer.

Still, it does mean that Weiner, who was being investigated separately for possible inappropriate communications with a minor -- a felony-- had Clinton’s e-mails on his own computer. This, and not simply her use of a private e-mail server, was part of the reason it sank Clinton’s candidacy.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, fired Comey as FBI director on May 9, apparently because, as far as the president is concerned, the FBI director wasn’t tough enough on Clinton. Trump contended that the director had given Clinton “a free pass for many bad deeds’’ when he decided not to recommend criminal charges in the case.

While Clinton continues to blame everything and everyone but herself for the defeat, Shattered, the recently published account of her campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, paints a very different picture.

It was, wrote New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani on April 17, an inept and dysfunctional campaign, an epic “Titanic-like disaster made up of a series of perverse and often avoidable missteps by an out-of-touch candidate and her strife-ridden staff.”

Can’t everyone who loses an election blame some unforeseen event? Had Iran not taken American embassy personnel hostage before the 1980 election, Jimmy Carter might have beaten Ronald Reagan.

Had Ross Perot not run in 1992, George H.W. Bush would probably have retained the White House, and it would have been the last we’d have heard of Bill Clinton.

But Hillary Clinton has a sense of entitlement second to none and won’t give up. “I’m back to being an activist citizen, and part of the resistance,” she announced.

I’ve never before seen the people out of power in the United States use a word, “resistance,” which conjures up the necessity of fighting against an illegitimate regime, one that was not democratically elected.

Such language wasn’t thrown around even in the disputed 2000 election, which was won far more controversially by George W. Bush against Al Gore.

As well, some political scientists have begun to use the negative term “Trump regime” rather than “Trump administration.” The implication is that it is no longer a liberal democratic government.

But Trump isn't Marshal Philippe Pétain and America isn’t a Vichy France governed by puppets controlled by Hitler (or in this case, Vladimir Putin) – though Clinton seems to think so. (She insists Trump remains tightly aligned with the Russian president.) Trump isn’t even Marine Le Pen and the National Front.

And whatever they may think, Clinton and Barack Obama aren’t Charles de Gaulle’s Free French trying to liberate their country from a foreign power.

Trump has not yet in any way overstepped his constitutional powers, and the judiciary and Congress are doing a more than adequate job of quashing much of his program. the country retains a critical free press and civil liberties.

If anyone is putting democracy in danger it isn’t Trump, but people who refuse to accept his election. The Democratic Party is no longer the opposition; it is “the resistance.”

Assume the Democrats win next time – we may see some real so-called resistance from all those Trump voters. They see that Democrats have utter contempt for them.

Why should they accept the results of an election, they’ll argue; the other side didn’t. Clinton is sowing deep divisions in the country.

If you think I'm being hyperbolic, just keep in mind the way people are tossing around that slogan “resistance.” That's “war talk,” not electoral politics, and sooner or later it might not be just a metaphor. Words have consequences.