CNN Publishes Op-Ed from Former Sen. Al Franken, First Since 2018 Resignation

President Donald Trump “may very well refuse to leave” if he loses in November, former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) argued in a Wednesday op-ed for CNN, his first for the outlet since leaving the Senate in disgrace in 2018.

“Donald Trump appears to be losing badly to Donald Trump,” Franken argued, but he added Democrats “must offer the American people a real rationale for voting in the fall.” He also suggested a Trump victory “would be a disaster for everything Democrats hold dear.”

The former senator raised the specter that Trump would refuse to leave office in the event former Vice President Joe Biden won — and offered Democrats advice for winning the Senate, where Republicans have held a majority since 2014. “If Trump loses a close election, he may very well refuse to leave. Biden has to win by a lot. And to do that and carry Democrats to a majority in the Senate, he has to offer Americans a vision of what America can be.”

Franken left office in 2018 after nearly a

dozen women came forward with allegations that he had sexually harassed them. A former aide to Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) alleged as recently as last year that he had grabbed her from behind during a photograph at a 2006 event. “He’s telling the photographer, ‘Take another one. I think I blinked. Take another one,’” the woman said. “And I’m just frozen. It’s so violating. And then he gives me a little squeeze on my buttock, and I am bright red. I don’t say anything at the time, but I felt deeply, deeply uncomfortable.”

He launched a weekly radio show on SiriusXM in September 2019 and said in an interview he “absolutely” regretted his decision to resign. “I can’t go anywhere without people reminding me of this, usually with some version of ‘You shouldn’t have resigned,’” Franken said.

In his op-ed for CNN, Franken invoked the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) to argue that Biden could win the 2020 presidential race by running as the more empathetic candidate. “We are capable of restoring our place in the world and of being a nation that remembers that, as Paul Wellstone put it, ‘We all do better when we all do better.’

“Joe Biden is not Franklin Roosevelt,” Franken added. “But he is Joe Biden, a fundamentally decent man who could begin healing some of the divisions that this president has deliberately exploited and deepened.”