Wrong about Trump

 Before the election I thought that, bad as Trump is, talk about his refusing to accept the facts if he lost the election was both farfetched and a veering a little toward the paranoid. Well I was wrong, and the paranoiacs were right.  It is one thing to observe that Democratic Party machines cheat a little at election time, and that the cheating probably has tipped a few very close state wide contests from time to time.  (The Texas primary that sent Lyndon Johnson to the senate and a recent senate race in Minnesota come to mind.)  It is another to claim that a nationwide conspiracy has erased millions of valid votes and counted hundreds of thousands of invalid ones in multiple states in a presidential election, thereby denying reelection to the actual winner. I know of no knowledgeable person who thinks something like that is doable. Karl Rove has likened it to a fantastic plot of a villain in a James Bond movie.

I don’t know if Trump really believes it or not, and in terms of judging his behavior it doesn’t matter much. A normal, responsible, at least fairly decent person who thought he might have been cheated in an election would gather his evidence and go to court where he would expect to have to put up or shut up with his evidence either being good enough to make his case or not good enough. He would not scream without offering any evidence that he had won “big”,  and that secret enemies had stolen the election from him.

That sort of behavior would be bad enough in a race for a seat on a city council somewhere. From a president of the United States it is dangerous and execrable, but that is what we are getting from Trump.  Recently as the experts in a council of the homeland security department  announced their findings that the systems used in the election were safe and secure, he tweeted that Democrats had used election  software to delete or switch to Biden almost three million votes for him. This stuff  is pathetic and funny and would be funnier if it were not for what it doing to the country.

Trump has convinced millions of people that this year’s presidential election was a fraud  with an earned victory stolen from him and his voters, and thus that the incoming administration will be illegitimate.   There are valid reasons for people to be generally skeptical of what they hear from officials, bureaucrats,  and those in the traditional media.  Such skepticism is generally beneficial.  Falling for nonsensical conspiracy theories is not.  Falling for  this one  can leave a person no longer believing he lives in a representative and fairly free republic. That’s not good for the country. I doubt if Trump cares about that, and that is one more piece of evidence of how little he seems to care for  the country or the responsibility of his office.

The good news is that he soon will be gone. There is evidence that the skids are being greased. Senator Lankford has demanded that Biden and Harris be given the intelligence briefings Trump has denied them and promised action if it does not happen.  There probably are other things happening as well to arrange for things to go right in the next couple of months, but it is a heck of a note that such efforts are necessary in the United States of America.