CNN Chief Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin admitted that he did not want to sound alarmist in his Monday morning analysis on New Day. Still, he sure did sound the alarm on what he sees as a current constitutional crisis surrounding American elections.
Following a clip of former President Donald Trump continuing his baseless harangue on voter integrity during a Georgia rally on Saturday, Toobin appeared on the CNN set, joined by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, to assess the current state of all things Trump.
John Berman described the clip as “the former president of the United States admitting, or maybe confessing, during his Saturday night rally that he tried to pressure Republican governor Brian Kemp of Georgia to help him overturn the election results there,” before noting “no shame” in Trump’s baseless claims.
Toobin agreed then cited a Robert Kagan column in The Washington Post published last week titled “Our Constitutional Crisis is Already Here.” He explained Kagan’s thesis by noting, “we have a substantial portion of the population who will not acknowledge that the other side can win an election legitimately. Trump said it at the rally. That even in 2022, 2024, we are not going to believe that a Democrat can legitimately win an election.”
After listing examples of the new phenomenon of election audits that follow undesirable results, Toobin said, “the idea that your opponents are illegitimate and incapable of questioning an
Toobin then compared Trump’s ongoing campaigning on the notion he was cheated by the results of the 2020 general election to former Vice President Al Gore losing in 2000 after the Supreme Court decided in favor of George W. Bush. Gore left the political stage and accepted that this is the way politics works, he noted.
Suppose we are in a place where a sizable constituency will never accept that a political rival has fairly won an election. That level of widespread cynicism and conspiracy is something that the original framers never accounted for in writing the Constitution, suggesting that Kagan and Toobin are correct in their assessment that we are in a crisis.
Watch above via CNN.