My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

Trump has smashed my small hopes that he would be an even-handed president despite having been a pompous, vindictive candidate prone to tweeting conspiracy theories. In fact, President-elect Trump seems to be the exact same person as candidate Trump. He’s more interested in victory laps, conducting personal business and tweeting boasts and rants than in security briefings.

As Amy Davidson of the New Yorker noted, “[Trump] seems unwilling to view the Presidency as an office, which has defined limits, instead of as a new way to express his personal desires, which have none.”

There will be no swamp draining on Trump’s watch. Trump’s cabinet appointments are a Swamp Preservation Board, or perhaps the Ranks of Hypocrisy. Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, just got picked for Secretary of State. Not commerce or energy chief as one might expect given his experience, but top diplomat. Maybe it’s not surprising since Putin bestowed the Russian kleptocracy’s “Order of Friendship” upon him. The swamp smells horrific and has a thick layer of oil spreading across it.

Trump, meanwhile, quickly dismissed a recent CIA assessment that implicated Russia in hacking both the DNC and RNC earlier this year, yet only releasing e-mails from the DNC to Wikileaks. The CIA assessment concludes that not only did the Russians interfere in the election, they did so in Trump’s favor. The FBI has been investigating the same events and is seeking to extradite two Russian hackers who are currently detained in Thailand and the Czech Republic.

Sens. John McCain, Chuck Schumer, Lindsey Graham and Jack Reed have launched a bipartisan investigation into this breach and other cyber threats to our national security. Russia’s meddling could be construed as revenge served — how appropriately — cold.

Dan Rather observed, “The Founding Fathers worried about a demagogue rising to power backed by a foreign adversary. That notion seemed to diminish to the point of a quaint anachronism over the centuries as our democracy solidified and our strength as a world power grew. No longer.”

The worst irony of all is that the Electoral College was meant to be a failsafe against a demagogue (“a person with talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity”) or someone influenced by a foreign government, and instead it’s going to pick the suspected Russian-backed propagandist over the will of the people. The “rabble” chose the steady, qualified candidate despite a high level of populist dissatisfaction.

Furthermore, many states that contributed to Trump’s electoral advantage are net federal spending recipients, whereas the states that voted for Hillary, including Minnesota, tend to pay more in federal taxes than they receive. What blue states get, in the words of Steven Johnson, is “more taxation with less representation.” Minnesota is second on the list behind New Jersey for low voting power combined with high federal tax contributions. A New Jersey person’s vote counts only a third of what a ballot in Wyoming does due to the Electoral College.

The most striking thing to me is the widespread belief that rural people (who tend to be Republican) deserve to have weighted votes compared to city people (who tend to be Democrats) because they represent more geographic area. First of all, it’s one person, one vote, not one acre, one vote. Low population density does not entitle people to voting power advantage.

Secondly, this argument has echoes of the “Three-Fifths Compromise,” in which slaves counted as only partial people for census purposes. The population of rural areas is majority white, and the populations of many urban areas are much more diverse and often majority minority. Thus, asserting that rural people should have their vote count more is not just a rural bias, it can also be shorthand for a racial bias that a white person’s vote should count more than a black person’s vote. Indeed, this year it did.

So, thanks to the peculiarities of the Electoral College, we’re in the muck. The Watergate break-in occurred before the 1972 election, and it took until 1974 before the rule of law resulted in Nixon’s resignation. We are likely headed for a constitutional crisis with Trump as well. He’ll take charge of the presidency with the most conflicts of interest in history. Hopefully our democratic institutions can withstand him as they did Nixon. He’ll do everything he can — to lie without compunction and blame the press — to stop our system from reining him in.

Carl Bernstein, the reporter famous for breaking the Watergate story, stated, “No president, including Richard Nixon, has been so ignorant of fact and disdains fact in the way this President-elect has.”

The handwriting is already on the wall in the month since the election — Trump is going to make Nixon look like a person of integrity.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.