OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: Russian dressing on side

Many readers have been irritated by my recurring reference to Donald Trump as the preposterous second-place president.

Today I have good news. I am retiring the phrase.

Henceforth, I will write--with great moral and patriotic outrage--that Trump is the preposterous Russian-endorsed second-place president.

Trump is preposterous for the very reason the Russians endorsed him: He's a clown who defiles and damages America.

He's second-place because he got nearly 3 million fewer votes nationwide than Hillary Clinton. He won in the electoral college, which--I grudgingly accept--is what counts.

Our electoral college system was created in part to protect smaller-population slave states. Its apportionment is based on congressional delegation rules, which give all states two senators no matter their size. That's all right by me for the U.S. Senate, but it's not all right by me for bestowing inordinate presidential-selecting power on states abounding in buffalo rather than people.

The electoral college is as antiquated as the original constitutional provision decreeing that slaves counted as three-fifths of persons for congressional districting purposes.

The provision was effectively repealed by human evolution and amendment, which is what should happen, but sadly won't, to the electoral college.

America is one country. We're all virtual next-door neighbors in the digital age. All of us should have equal power in selecting the leader of this one country, whether bunched in Los Angeles or rugged loners under the big sky of Wyoming.

In fact, that's American case law--one man, one vote--based on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. That's except that we contradict it by continuing to live in 2018 with the 1700s artifact of a presidential election system.

People argue that a direct popular vote would cause the presidential candidates to ignore small states. But they ignore about 38 states now, emphasizing a dozen or so "battlegrounds." As a small and confirmed red state, Arkansas won't get visited much either way.

As for Russian-endorsed: Special Counsel Robert Mueller has secured indictments of 13 Russians in a scheme by which they used our social media to pretend to be Americans and promote Trump and slander Clinton during the campaign.

Confronted with news of the indictments, Trump said nothing about being bothered that Russians had tampered in our election. No politician likes to offend his base.

He answered only in the context of his megalomaniacal self, of course. He said that the tampering--which he had previously denied--did not cause him to get elected.

Regardless of whether the Russians were effective, the point is that their intent was to try to weaken America with this Trumpian atrocity as president.

Trump won the electoral vote by a scant 80,000 cumulative votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. That's a minute fraction of a single percentage point in each state.

We now know the Russians were using American-looking disguises on Facebook to target those three states with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages.

A group calling itself Being Patriotic that was run out of St. Petersburg--the one in Russia--bought Facebook ads targeting miners in Pennsylvania. Those ads assailed Clinton as the miners' mortal enemy, deified Trump as their savior and announced forthcoming pro-Trump rallies that never occurred, because the point was not the rally but the propaganda.

It is illogical to think that Russian propaganda targeted smartly into Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan did not contribute to the microscopically decisive margins by which Trump tragically won those states.

I'm getting messages from people scoffing at the notion that they despised Hillary and loved Trump because Russians made them do it. They contend that they hated her long before.

I accept that many Trump voters were not Russian-influenced. They were Russian-allied. They prefer Russians to Democrats.

Trump defenders say the Russians began their operation in 2014 before Trump announced; that they meddled in behalf of Bernie Sanders as well, and that they continued meddling after the election toward what plainly was an ultimate objective to disrupt and divide America, not specifically elect Trump.

To that I say: That they started in 2014 bears not at all on their tactical pivot to Trump in 2016; that their favoring Sanders and then Trump means only that they wanted to oppose Clinton with whatever disruptive tool was immediately handy, and that it's not much of a defense to argue that what the Russians really wanted was to damage America and Trump just so happened to be a primitive wedge they found useful.

Now the debate is between two words--witting and unwitting. Was Trump an unwitting tool of the Russians, as Sanders seems to have been? Or was Trump a witting conspirator in their scheme?

Here I must offend my liberal readers by siding with my conservative ones.

Trump seems entirely too witless to be witting.

He was but a rock. Russia threw the rock. Somehow, the rock crashed through a White House window.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 02/20/2018

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