I want to get something off my chest about Donald J. Trump’s pending presidency.

He will be the duly elected, legitimate president of the United States of America. The popular vote totals don’t matter. It won’t matter one damn bit to me — really and truly — that he got 46.1 percent of the vote compared to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s  total of 48 percent.

He will be as legit as Bill Clinton’s presidency was in 1992, when he won with 43 percent of the popular vote in that three-way race against George H.W. Bush and H. Ross Perot. His presidency will be as legit as Richard Nixon’s was in 1968, when he won also with 43 percent in another three-way contest with Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace.

I get that many on the left will say otherwise, just as many on the right tried to dismiss President Clinton’s 1992 victory as a fluke, given the presence of Perot on the ballot. It wasn’t. Nor was Trump’s victory.

The popular vote is not the issue that threatens Trump’s presidential legitimacy. It’s the other stuff involving the Russian hackers and whether they actually had a tangible impact on the election result.

Congress needs to get to the root of what happened there. The CIA needs to reveal — to the extent that it can without compromising its own intelligence-gathering capability — what it knows about Russian involvement.

I hope for the sake of the country that we learn the Russians did not actually affect the outcome. I have a serious fear, though, that we might learn something sinister.

But let’s steer away from this vote-total argument.

Trump won where it counted, in accordance with how the U.S. Constitution sets forth the election of presidents.