In their Tuesday New York Times off-lead “news analysis,” reporters Jonathan Martin and Michael Wines tried to keep anti-Trump hope alive in “Trump’s Win, But Little Else, Is Now Settled – A Vast Divide Persists After the Electors Vote.” Bill Clinton, a former president, was posed as preaching truth to power.
In Florida, protesters swarmed the Capitol rotunda, one hoisting a “Trump Is Too Rusky” sign featuring a hammer and sickle. In Wisconsin’s statehouse, a heckler shouted, “We’re all going to go to war and die thanks to you,” during the formal meeting of the Electoral College.
And in New York, an elector by the name of William Jefferson Clinton cast his vote for his wife and then came out to make plain that he believes Donald J. Trump won the presidency only because of outside interference in the election.
“We had the Russians and the F.B.I., and she couldn’t prevail against that, but she did everything else and still won by 2.8 million votes,” Mr. Clinton said, his determined smile belying his fury.
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Democrats were unable to persuade enough electors to withhold their support for Mr. Trump. He easily cleared the 270-vote threshold needed to defeat Hillary Clinton, with only two Republican electors declining to cast their vote for the president-elect. But the protests at state capitols across the country offered a preview of a tumultuous inauguration and first 100 days of the new administration.
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As for whether Mr. Trump would now begin to offer a hand of friendship to his critics, Ms. Conway noted that he had met with multiple Democrats and spoken with President Obama “several times.” “He said, ‘I’ll be president of all people,’ but the left is trying to delegitimize his election,” she said. “They’re trying to deny him what he just earned. So why is the burden always on him?”
Democrats vow that burden will only increase.
As with everything else in the world, Republicans are to blame for starting it.
With liberals determined to confront the president-elect and Mr. Trump continuing to scorn his critics while denying intelligence officials’ assessment that Russia was responsible for hacking Democrats, the divisions so stark during this year’s campaign are on a course to grow worse.
Washington has been drifting toward perpetual political combat for more than two decades, at least since the Newt Gingrich-led Republican revolution of 1994.
But this time, “People on the left are scared about Trump in a way they were not scared about Reagan or George W. Bush,” said Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University who has written extensively on the history of liberalism.
Moreover, the uneasiness with Mr. Trump has hardly receded in the nearly six weeks since his election.
That might have something to do with the Times pushing for the overturning of the election results.
Democrats, after a period of shell shock from their loss, say they will offer a well-financed resistance. Mr. Trump’s cabinet selections so far, and his refusal to acknowledge Russian efforts to affect the election, have only solidified Democrats’ resolve.
The Times promises a geared-up oppositional left.
While the left of American politics often lacks cohesion, leaders of many groups say this time will be different. The Center for American Progress and some groups directed by David Brock, a liberal strategist, are gearing up for the fight; the Democracy Alliance, a progressive umbrella group, is preparing for a March donor summit to focus entirely on how to regain power in state capitals. And a number of left-leaning activists are planning protests in conjunction with Mr. Trump’s inauguration next month.
The reporters explained that George W. Bush’s squeaker win was acceptable (barely) because he was seen as part of a moderate tradition:
While progressives were furious with how Mr. Bush came to office in 2001, he was part of a well-known political family and had run on a message of “compassionate conservatism.”
The arrival in Washington of Ronald Reagan as leader of the conservative movement is the better comparison, Mr. Kazin said. He noted that then, as now, liberal advocacy groups and publications saw their support soar in the days after Reagan’s election and that progressives organized vast protests (a quarter-million people descended on the capital in September 1981 for a little-remembered Solidarity Day march organized by the A.F.L.-C.I.O.).
Reagan, however, had won in a 44-state landslide, capturing 489 electoral votes and leaving little doubt about his mandate. Mr. Trump, as the protesters Monday sought to make clear, is coming to office under far different circumstances.
Also on Tuesday, Nate Cohn slammed uneducated Trump voters in “How to Explain Split Between Popular Vote and Electoral College.”
....Mr. Trump had an advantage in the traditional battlegrounds because most are whiter and less educated than the country as a whole....Most of the traditional battleground states are much whiter, less educated and particularly less Hispanic than the rest of the country.
Cohn, who writes on statistics for the paper, somehow ignored that Trump’s share of the minority vote was larger and his share of the white vote smaller than that of the previous Republican candidate Mitt Romney.
