When English needs a better verb, coin it. Trump was ELECTORALCOLLEGED president.
Our democratic system badly needs a succinct way to sharply differentiate between voters electing our president, and that other anti-democratic, twisted thing that happened in December rather than November 2016.
I propose:
Voters ELECTED Clinton.
304 other people later ELECTORALCOLLEGED Trump.
It grates when I hear anyone, especially in the media, speak of how "we elected Trump," or "voters elected Trump," or "the American people elected Trump." Those phrases are inaccurate. Trump was chosen to be president by 304 Electoral College "electors," who in turn were hand-picked by a number of state level Republican parties specifically for their reliably extreme Republican partisanship. A month after the American voter elected Hillary Clinton to be our president by a margin of 2.9 million votes, the 304 Republican hyper-partisans chose to overturn that outcome, the decisively expressed will of the American people, and instead named Trump to be the next president of our poor country.
Those 304 EC selectees didn't have to defy the expressed will of the people. They could have made president the candidate whom the American voters just elected by a considerable margin. Granted, some EC members may have then faced prosecution back home. But applying sober judgement and patriotism to do what's right, defend democracy, and protect the nation from demagogic and dangerously incompetent leadership can require courage and isn't something one should expect to always be cost-free.
Of course, none of the 304 reliably hyper-partisan Republicans chose to do that.
As far as "electing Trump" goes, we voters didn't even elect the electors. There were no electors' names on your ballot; you didn't vote for THEM. My ballot had Clinton's name, and Trump's and a couple of strays'. Our votes as we cast them were for a president of our nation, not nameless and faceless people essentially unknown to all but a few state-level party officials. When about 66 million of us voted for Clinton and about 63 million for Trump, our puposes and intents were to elect the the next president.
Language has failed us in this area, to date, because we've let it. The back-channel circumvention of the voters that is this insult to democracy, the Electoral College, is after-the-fact, obscurely executed, and just so bizarre that it's disorienting. When we've been victimized by it, the feelings of devastation, outrage, and impotence are such that in in our flailing protests we've acceded to the language used by the EC's beneficiaries. But for me, to hear so many now discussing prospects for American voters to "re-elect Trump," without getting challenged on it, feels as false and offensive as someone saying "the Democrat Party" and not getting corrected for it.
I have obseved a few in the media consciously try in their own ways to not be inaccurate, carefully referring to Trump not as having gotten elected by voters, but as him "attaining office," or "achieving victory." I commend those few good journalists and commentators for their care and their interest in being accurate. But this can be made easier for all... and much punchier as well. It just takes the one new and better verb.
Our inadequate terms have allowed the Electoral College's subversion against the American voter to get away with sounding like democracy, and in my opinion that needs to stop. We need the clearer word, to flush the EC's results out from hiding in the inspecificity of the language used for our elections at large, and clarify that America's presidential selection is something very different and is increasingly subject to being undemocratic, destructive, and dangerous to the nation and the world.
One of English's great strengths is its celebrated capacity to grow, to fill holes in its expressive capacity with new words. We've always coined wholly new verbs or enlisted nouns, both common and proper, into serving as verbs to make our speech and writing clearer, richer, and truer. Telescope, gerrymander, weasel, bowlderize, lobby, rat, phone, pocket, rocket, key, fax, text -- one could list verbs-from-nouns on this list for days. A handful of our great 16th and 17th century English playwrights alone coined hundreds of verbs.
So the verb "to ELECTORALCOLLEGE" someone, or to "be ELECTORALCOLLEGED" into office, is nothing out of the ordinary for our wonderful language. We do this all the time... English has plenty of room for one more noun to be verbified.
And in this case, boy, is it needed.
Summarizing: We didn't elect Trump in 2016, three hundred and four people ELECTORALCOLLEGED him. Voters aren't going to elect him in 2020, either... much less "re-elect" him next November, that being impossible since we never elected him a first time.
But there does remain the real and very terrible risk that next year after we elect the Democratic nominee again, a month later 270 or more Republicans will come around and ELECTORALCOLLEGE him back into the White House.
We're at war here with not just Trump in 2020 but with the Electoral College itself, and it's a hard, bitter war with massive consequences. The words we use matter. I recommend we re-frame one of the terms of this fight we are in for one citizen-one vote democracy, simply by using a new and clearer verb for how Trump and Geo. W. Bush became president.
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