Though the media took his denial of election reality as a shock, President Donald Trump was never going to accept the results of this year's election unless he was declared the winner. He said so himself years ago.
This is the elephant in the room, the undeniable fact that demolishes his credibility when he says he was actually reelected — and, incidentally, the reason why both he and the people backing his unprecedented post-election temper tantrum will be remembered by history as forever losers. Indeed, long before the 2020 election, Trump's go-to response to even the possibility of losing any election has been to accuse the other side of cheating.
At this point the president and his legal team have resorted to gish galloping, or attempting to win an argument by overwhelming an opponent with an excessive number of spurious claims — that all of these Republican and/or pro-Trump judges and officials are part of a giant conspiracy to steal the election from him, that large numbers of dead people voted, that Dominion voting machines changed results, and so on — in the hope that they will not be able to keep track of and thereby comprehensively debunk all of them. As my colleague Amanda Marcotte has written, there is evidence that many Trump supporters don't even sincerely believe that the election was stolen, but are making intentionally bad faith arguments out of a mixture of partisanship, wounded pride, a desire to delegitimize President-elect Joe Biden and the hope that they can perhaps help the president pull off a coup.
This is no chidush. Trump will spend the next 3 years going on the talking circuit and telling people he's the actual president and that electoral fraud cost him the White House. In 3 years he'll show up at the Republican nomination meetings and demand to be made the no. 1 contestant. He'll campaign in 2024 on a simple platform - I was robbed. Give me my White House back. Salon isn't telling us anything new.
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