Womp Womp

     There was a reason why Bari Weiss's co-opted CBS was the only network to carry Trump's usual whiny grievances over the 2020 election results last night: Because they were the usual whiny grievances and networks are finally getting wise to this embittered carnival barker.

      Basically, Trump wanted to sow distrust among the American electorate in advance of the 2026 midterms and declared the entire electoral system was broken beyond repair. If that was his goal, then it stands to reason that the only people who would even give this preposterous idea any house room would be MAGA voters, aka Republican voters. Ergo, last night's spectacle could only harm Republican incumbents and candidates this November.

     To bolster his arguments, Trump said that he'd declassified a tranche of documents (it's unclear if he'd magically done this just with his mind) "proving" that China meddled in our 2020 election, switched votes from him to Biden and that the intelligence community covered it up.

     However, on review of the declassified documents, journalists and pundits couldn't find the slightest shred of proof that China or the intelligence community did any such thing. In fact, even Trump himself never once said that the government has the smoking gun of any such conspiracy. In short, there was no there there.

     The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, which has been ceaselessly slamming Trump this year, wrote, "Since Mr. Trump declassified the memo, we can quote the part he didn’t. Vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results. The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity.” And even if some results were compromised, “audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.” 

     Another thing that Trump didn't say: In contradiction of leaked disclosures to the press, Trump never claimed that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, Georgia's Democratic senators, weren't legitimately-elected. That would've been a first in American history: The head of the executive branch claiming that duly-elected officials weren't actually elected, after all.

     That would've been a red line even Trump wasn't willing to cross.

     It's abundantly clear why Trump is trying to steal the 2026 midterms: He knows when Democrats get back the House, they will impeach him for a third time on Day One. There's little to no chance he'll be expelled by the Senate. Democrats may take back that chamber, too, but they won't have the 57 votes they'll need for expulsion. But Trump takes impeachment seriously even if there's no real followup in the Senate.

     This is why he's leaning on Senate Republicans to pass the SAVE Act (that's he's misnaming as the SAVE America Act) despite the fact that there just isn't enough votes to pass it. It's unpopular in the Senate and it's unpopular with the people. But Trump is incapable of listening to and being guided by reason and facts. He lives in his curdled little dream world and is increasingly angry at the round hole that won't let in the square peg. 

     And, as insane as it is that Trump is still litigating election results from nearly six years ago, the facts remain clear: Trump tried, and failed, no fewer than 63 times to overturn the results. Some of those defeats came at the hands of judges that Trump himself had nominated. Two attorneys who'd worked on his behalf wound up getting disbarred and another was forced to surrender his law license. Trump's ceaseless conspiracy theories about 2020 wrecked careers and, with his usual sociopathy, Trump couldn't have cared less.

     And the media is finally catching on to the fact that this buffoon, who still can't admit that he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, that Biden beat him by 7,000,000 popular votes and won the electoral college 306 to 232, will offer nothing of any substance. Donald Trump has become the very delineation of the adage that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

     I'm no psychiatrist but to me, that's the definition of obsessive-compulsive disorder, a quality you do not want in a person with his finger on the big red button.