Say what, Whoopi? I guess partisan memories fade fast. Today on the View, co-host Whoopi Goldberg went on a rant demanding that Republicans stop questioning the outcome of the election and instead “suck it up.” According to Whoopi, that’s how Democrats handled it in 2016.
“I want to say to all those people who don’t believe that Americans got out and voted, let me say this to you,” Whoopi said. She continued, “When you-know-who was elected four years ago, Hillary Clinton didn’t say ‘Hey, wait a minute, this doesn’t feel right. Stop the count.’ She didn’t say ‘This isn’t right, I’m not going for it.’ She didn’t say any of that. So all of you, suck it up. Suck it up like we sucked it up.”
She went on to say, “How dare you question it.”
Um, yeah. Okay. Should the GOP do it just like Democrats did? Because what I recall was that immediately after Trump won in 2016 there were protests around the country, some of which turned into riots. And do you know what the slogan was that was chanted and spread online in connection with these protests? Here’s a hint from Nov 10, 2016: “We. Reject. The President-elect.”
The Today show labeled these the “Not my president” protests because that was the common thread. In this clip you’ll see people burning Trump hats, burning Trump in effigy and carrying signs calling for his impeachment. This is more than two months before he even took office. Is this what sucking it up looks like, Whoopi?
That energy to immediately reject the results of the election never went away, it just mutated into the resistance. NY Times columnist Paul Krugman called Trump’s victory “illegitimate” because of Russian interference in the election.
So this was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement.
And because it was illegitimate, more than 50 Democrats said they would not attend Trump’s inauguration. Is that what sucking it up looks like, Whoopi?
But many on the left went beyond not showing up. There were calls by Michael Moore and others to disrupt Trump’s inauguration. And sure enough that’s what happened. There were destructive protests in Washington, DC and efforts to interfere in the event itself by a group called Disrupt J20. A limousine was set on fire in front of the Washington Post’s offices.
Someone set the limo on fire. pic.twitter.com/y4AFr5HNjk
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) January 20, 2017
And the day after the inauguration was the Women’s March in which literally hundreds of thousands of people came out to protest President Trump. But the message was a carryover from the election protests months earlier: “Not my president! Not my president!”
https://youtu.be/SPDw_TjwuOc?t=85
Again, is this what sucking it up looks like, Whoopi?
A few months later a deranged Bernie Sanders supporter attempted to murder a group of GOP congressman and Senators at a baseball practice in Alexandria, VA and would have succeeded if not for the security detail on hand to protect Rep. Steve Scalise. Around this same time there were numerous other threats reported against GOP lawmakers.
The other part of Whoopi’s rant had to do with Hillary Clinton. And here it’s true that Clinton did concede the election, but it’s also true that she spent the next year offering various explanations for her loss. She blamed so many factors, including the presumption she would win, that it was actually hard to keep track of them all.
This never really went away. In fact, last May Hillary claimed that you can run a good campaign and still have the election “stolen” from you. In case there was any doubt what she meant, last September she gave an interview calling Trump an “illegitimate” president.
I’m not even going to get into the two full years of Democrats promising proof of collusion with Russia, all of which seems to have been motivated by a not-so-secret desire to remove Trump from office because most Democrats never really accepted his win. I also won’t delve into the months of talk about Trump’s mental fitness which similarly seemed aimed at a 25th Amendment solution to removing Trump or the impeachment Democrats perused and then never mentioned during the campaign. But let’s just say the idea that Democrats sucked it up is a little hard to accept.
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