On Wednesday Voxs Ezra Klein publisheda long pieceabout the current crisis in our government. He wrote that our president lacks legitimacy, our government is paralyzed, our problems are going unsolved. I would say that legitimacy, the first of those issues,is the source of all the others.

Donald Trumps legitimacy problem is not just a matter of losing the popular vote. Other presidents have assumed office after such an outcome. In 1824 John Quincy Adams became president after the election decision was thrown to the House of Representatives. In 1876 Rutherford B. Hayes became president after losing the popular vote to Samuel Tilden by more than 250,000 votes although corruption was so rife in that election its fair to say no one will ever know for sure who got the highest tally. In 1888 Benjamin Harrison won 233 electoral votes to Grover Clevelands 168, but lost the national count by about 90,000 votes. It didnt happen again for 112 years when George W. Bush was installed by the Supreme Court after a virtual tie in Florida and a dubious vote count. And then just16 years later, it happened again.

Throughout that last 16 years questions have been raised about our democracy, including the workings of the anachronistic Electoral College, the fact that every locality and state seems to have a different system, andthe way Republicans have systematically disenfranchised voters whom they believe would be likely to vote for their opponents. There has been underlying doubt about the integrity of Americas electoral system simmering for a long time. This year it has come to a boil.

For at least a year weve been aware of social-media propaganda and foreign actors hacking the systems of various arms of the Democratic Party in order to influence the presidential campaign. The experts tell us that the Russian government has directed a number of similar cyber operations around the worldand that this one was their most sophisticated. Evidently, the idea was to sow chaos and undermine Americans already sorely tested faith in our electoral system.

According toa highly detailed investigative reportby Massimo Calabresi of Time, the evidence suggests that Russias President Vladimir Putin had a particular ax to grind against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for what he termed a signal she sent in 2011, which he claimed sparked protests against him. The extent to which Putin truly favored Donald Trump is still unknown, and the question of whether there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government is now the focus of various investigations of Congress and a Justice Department special counsel. The odd behavior of Trumps close associates as well as his obsession with shutting down the investigation certainly raise suspicions. But at this point it is pure speculation to think about what kind of deal might have been made.

This weeks story byThe Intercept,reporting on an National Security Agency document that showed evidence the Russian military had made serious attempts to infiltrate voter information rolls around the country, suggests, however, yet another way the goals of Donald Trump and the Russian government were the same. Former FBI counterterrorism officer and cybersecurity expert Clinton Watts (best known for his quip follow the bodies of dead Russians in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee) raised some additional questions ina piece for the Daily Beast this week.He believes that the main objective of this operation was not to alter the vote count but rather to instill more doubt about the process.

Wattswrote, I noticed a shift in Kremlin messaging last October, when its overt news outlets, conspiratorial partner websites, and covert social-media personas pushed theories of widespread voter fraud and hacking. He cited aReuters articleindicating that a Kremlin-backed think tank report drafted in October and distributed in the same way, warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. The think tank also advised it would bebetter for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral systems legitimacy and damage Clintons reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency.

Its interesting to note that at the same moment the operation shifted in that direction, Trump himself was relentlessly flogging exactly the same accusation, saying in every rally from October on that Clinton and her campaign had rigged the system in her favor. Over and over againhe would suggestthat the outcome was predetermined:

When the outcome is fixed, when the system is rigged, people lose hope they stop dreaming, they stop trying

He routinely told his followers stories likethis:

One of the reasons Ive been saying that the system is so corrupt and is so rigged, is not only what happens at the voters booth and you know things happen, folks.

He passed alongtweets like this:

Trumpeven made bizarre accusations that Hillary Clintons campaign chairman John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling and notoriouslyrefused to saywhetherhe would abide by the results if Clinton won. It was obvious that Donald Trump was planning to challenge her legitimacy.

In fact, Trump did more to create mistrust and doubt in the U.S. electoral system than the Russian governments highly developed hacking and misinformation campaign. Whether they were working together is still unknown but they were definitely rowing in the same direction. As much as the president likes to whine and complain about the Democrats being sore losers, the irony is that Trump himself played the greatest role in undermining the legitimacy of his win.

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Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton and the true cause of Donald Trump's legitimacy crisis his own actions - Salon