The American people did not really choose Donald Trump. His presidency exists without the support of the majority of voters and, in turn, without a true mandate from the American people. Trump walks and talks instead like an authoritarian, and seems to believe he is above the people and the law, and need not answer to either. He wants to be untouchable. He behaves with impunity and acts as if legal standards like obstruction of justice don’t apply to him.



Firing the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, demonstrates a whole new level of defiance of the rule of law and our foundational system of checks and balances. More bluntly, it proves just how dangerous an illegitimate president is to our democracy. His actions do not only undermine the legitimacy and credibility of his presidency; they are a direct threat to our constitutionalism and our democratic legitimacy.



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Our democratic legitimacy comes from the “power of the people”. When a president is duly elected by the people, that person is accountable to those people. After a president is elected by a majority of the people, it is self-evident that the people who gave them power can also take it away. But when a president wins the White House while losing the popular vote, this accountability to the people is lost.



The president took power in defiance of the people, and expects to be able to do so again. So the will of the people becomes irrelevant in the mind – and decision making – of an illegitimate president. An illegitimate president can fire the FBI director in order to impede an investigation into his own campaign, and believe there will be no consequences. If he can fire the head of the FBI, what else can he do?



This seems like an obvious demand at this point, but it’s worth stating clearly that now, more than ever, we need a special prosecutor appointed to look into the continuing drip, drip, drip revelations about Russia. But even more than that, the United States must regain our democratic legitimacy by ensuring that no citizen, president or otherwise, is above the law or above the American people.

The case for obstruction of justice by the Trump administration is being built right now, and we must demand that Republicans and Democrats join together so that the grave danger to our democracy is called out for what it is and remedied – and not swept under the rug.



We also must not lose sight of the larger fight at hand. Tuesday’s events stem directly from our own illegitimate electoral system, which produced Trump the president. They are the result of voter suppression, dark money in politics, and the esoteric electoral college – all of which serve to silence the American people. To restore our democratic legitimacy, together, we must overcome these more entrenched challenges that strengthen those elected officials who opt to be silent when it is time to speak out.



We must make the national popular vote determinative, Congress must pass a 21st-century Voting Rights Act and we need to keep up the pressure in favor of comprehensive campaign finance reform. If we fail to do this, we are a nation at risk of the Trump-Pence administration becoming a catastrophic precedent, rather than a one-time phenomenon that our democracy overcame.

Russ Feingold was a 16-year member of the US Senate judiciary committee