Republicans outperformed the polls up and down the ballot in the 2020 election, to the surprise even of many Republican political operatives and survey researchers.
To be clear, Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Trump; Democrats will still control the House and still have a chance of picking up the Senate.
"Our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated," Trump said in a statement Saturday. "The American People are entitled to an honest election: that means counting all legal ballots, and not counting any illegal ballots."
The problem is, Trump's campaign has spent much of the past week in court with little success and without presenting anything close to evidence that points to a fraudulent result.
"You can't go to court just because you don't like the vote totals," Ohio State election law professor Ned Foley said on MSNBC over the weekend. "You have to have a legal claim, and you have to have evidence to back it up. And that's just not there."
The most direct attempt to undermine the integrity of the U.S. election with bad information came not from overseas sources or online liars but from a president standing behind the presidential seal at the White House and facing his defeat.
In the hours before his election loss Saturday, President Donald Trump spoke of “horror stories” in voting and counting across the land, but his stories were wrong. Election officials, Democrats and some Republicans blanched at his baseless recitation of sinister doings and his effort to delegitimize democracy’s highest calling.
As Donald J. Trump refuses to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in January, former President Barack Obama suggested that cancelling the White House’s cable-TV account could induce the President to leave.
“This is a man who enjoys watching television,” Obama told reporters. “What if, on Inauguration Day, he picks up the remote and nothing comes on?”
“This seems like the most peaceful way to get him to go,” Obama said.
Obama also said that, in order to avoid a constitutional crisis, the White House’s supply of Diet Coke could also be cut off, but added, “I don’t think it will come to that.”
“Once it dawns on him that there’s no cable, his days will stretch out before him in a vista of emptiness,” Obama said. “No ‘Fox & Friends.’ No Tucker Carlson. And no Shark Week.”
“He’ll be on the next helicopter out,” Obama predicted.
Not since the beginning of time has anyone ever made greater use of superlatives than Donald Trump. He has constantly been "the most" this, "the least" that and always the "best ever."
Superlatives and exaggerations are a common indulgence to which we all succumb. Journalists are, well, just the worst. Take the first line of this story (see above). Or take Politico's summary Saturday morning: "It's been the most unconventional and contentious election season of our lifetime."
We know what we mean when we say such things. We also know what Trump means when he says things like "you're going to see things you've never thought about seeing" or "they will get hit like no one's ever been hit before." We have long since become inured to him saying he is "the greatest jobs producer God has ever created" or, on the other hand, "the least racist person you will ever interview" or "the least anti-Semitic person that you've ever seen in your entire life."
To some degree, all this rhetorical excess makes it difficult to take what the president says seriously when he says serious things. Moreover, it becomes difficult to be taken seriously when reporting things that really do happen and really are unprecedented or truly record setting.