Trump is the new sheriff in town, deal with it

Editor’s note: According to analysts, Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory was 44th best out of 54 comparable elections. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.85 million votes.

Now that the Electoral College has recorded its final tally and given Donald Trump the largest margin of electoral votes since Ronald Reagan, another excuse for Hillary Clinton to use for her loss has disappeared along with the intimidation of Republican state electors, James Comey, and Russian hacking.

Some of Clinton’s supporters still claim foul because she won the popular vote over Trump, and that the Electoral College concept is flawed after 230 years of success. The Electoral College idea was a very contentious issue at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and James Madison was moved to craft consensus among the Founding Fathers to develop a detailed Electoral College system.

The Founders realized that a national popular election could be manipulated by a few individuals that could lead eventually to a dictatorship. Thus, the Electoral College became the core of our American system of constitutional federalism. They knew that the United States of America should be a union of states and not a union of individuals.

The Founding Fathers’ wisdom was never more prophetic than when the recent presidential election results showed that Clinton defeated Trump in California and New York by 4.9 million votes. She beat him in the national total by 2.8 million votes, indicating that Trump defeated her in the other 48 states by 2.1 million votes. Without the Electoral College, a majority of our states could soon become a non-entity in a presidential election, and America’s policies could be controlled by the two or three largest populated states.

There will be no do-over or mulligan for Hillary. As Eddie Murphy so eloquently stated in the movie, “48 Hours,” there’s a new sheriff in town. And he is going to be here for at least 1,461 days.

Happy New Year.

The writer lives in Litchfield-By-The-Sea, Pawleys Island.

This story was originally published December 31, 2016 at 3:41 PM with the headline "Trump is the new sheriff in town, deal with it."