Letters

‘Legitimate’ Story

Posted

I was a little surprised by the reaction in the letters column in the Jan. 28 edition to your Jan. 14 cover story on the riot by pro-Trump supporters in the Capitol on Jan. 6 in which five people were killed.

One of the underlying problems is that people seem to be taking it personally if their candidate lost. Your story was a legitimate one, and it resonated with readers. There have been close to 200 arrests since the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol and virtually every perpetrator left a very long trail of pro-Trump messages on social media in addition to the incriminating selfies they took inside the Capitol. Attorneys for many have said that they thought they were following Trump’s directives when he told them to “fight” and “show strength.” He did at one point mention doing it “peacefully” but that one stray mention did not seem to register with the crowd that he urged to march on the Capitol to try to force Congress to not certify the Electoral College results.

One letter writer argued that there was a legitimate belief by Donald Trump that the election was stolen. If Trump still has that belief it is because he cannot accept reality. Sixty-four court cases have proven otherwise. The Trump team won only one small case in Pennsylvania in which several thousand ballots were held outside of the count and later ruled to be ineligible to be counted. But they were never counted, so they had no impact on Biden’s substantial margin of victory in that state. This is an uncomfortable fact for many supporters of Donald Trump, but he lost by a fairly substantial margin, 7 million popular votes and 74 electoral college votes, 306 to 232. It is past time for supporters of the losing candidate to deal with it. Joseph R. Biden, only the second Catholic to be elected president of the United States, won the election fairly and legitimately.

Keith J. Kelly
Manhattan