Harry Reid: Trump 'a sexual predator who lost the popular vote'

It’s difficult to overestimate what a completely partisan creature Senator Harry Reid is, a man who will say anything to attack Republicans regardless of whether or not it’s true or what it does to the country. Fortunately, we won’t have to hear from Reid much longer as he is retiring. But today he published a parting shot at Donald Trump on his website:

I have personally been on the ballot in Nevada for 26 elections and I have never seen anything like the reaction to the election completed last Tuesday. The election of Donald Trump has emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry in America.

White nationalists, Vladimir Putin and ISIS are celebrating Donald Trump’s victory, while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear – especially African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, LGBT Americans and Asian Americans. Watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America.

I have heard more stories in the past 48 hours of Americans living in fear of their own government and their fellow Americans than I can remember hearing in five decades in politics. Hispanic Americans who fear their families will be torn apart, African Americans being heckled on the street, Muslim Americans afraid to wear a headscarf, gay and lesbian couples having slurs hurled at them and feeling afraid to walk down the street holding hands. American children waking up in the middle of the night crying, terrified that Trump will take their parents away. Young girls unable to understand why a man who brags about sexually assaulting women has been elected president.

[..]

If this is going to be a time of healing, we must first put the responsibility for healing where it belongs: at the feet of Donald Trump, a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate. Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try.

Obviously this isn’t an olive branch, it’s a withered middle finger to the president-elect. If what Reid cared about was urging Trump to mend fences with constituencies he has offended, attacking him as a “sexual predator” is not the way to do that. Reid doesn’t actually want those fences mended, he wants to stoke the chaos in the streets. He is pointedly refusing to do what President Obama suggested was necessary, i.e. give Trump a chance.

For years now Democrats have made much of the idea that Republicans were rooting for President Obama’s failure from the start. There was an urban myth spread by Obama himself (and other Democrats) that from the moment he came to office Senator Mitch McConnell proclaimed his biggest priority was insuring Obama did not get a 2nd term in office.

“When I first came into office, the head of the Senate Republicans said, ‘my number one priority is making sure president Obama’s a one-term president.’ Now, after the election, either he will have succeeded in that goal or he will have failed at that goal,” Obama told 60 Minutes in 2012.

That wasn’t true as Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler pointed out. Mitch McConnell did say something about trying to prevent Obama’s reelection but it was in late 2010 right before the midterm elections when Republicans were focused on their own electoral chances.

Now Harry Reid is going far beyond what Mitch McConnell said. He is trashing the president-elect days after the election in a way designed to make him illegitimate before he even takes office. And he’s doing this even as there are protests turning to vandalism around the country. Harry Reid is pouring gasoline on a very dangerous fire. He is a despicable man and the Senate will be a better place without him.