Backfire

By several accounts, President Trump is acknowledging that his attempts to question and even overturn vote totals he believes are in error will not succeed. He's set the transition process into motion and directed his staff to cooperate with the incoming folks likely to be working in a Joe Biden administration.

But of course he's not stopping his claims that the 2020 presidential election was so steeped in fraud that, rather than narrowly losing, he actually won by an amazing landslide. Both the president and his legal team continue to lay the blame for his defeat at the hands of incompetent or dishonest election officials. Or an electronic voting system run by a company whose leadership donated extensively to Democratic caniddates. Or thousands if not millions of fradulently cast mail-in ballots. Or anything, apparently, other than his own lack of discipline, immaturity and manifest character deficiencies and the fact that, as lousy of a candidate as Joe Biden is and as much of a grifting hack as Joe Biden is, he possesses the indisputable advantage of not being Hillary Clinton.

And here's the thing I think a lot of people overlooked. He's going to keep doing so. Donald Trump will literally never stop claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him until he's buried in a hideously garish golden coffin. And major media outlets will remain consistently unable to see that what they claim are an endless series of dunks on the president actually give him exactly what he wants: endless notoriety. And everybody who predicated their support for Biden on the idea it would send Trump home to obscurity will have to put up with seeing and hearing about him almost as often as they do now.

It's kind of ironic. More than one anti-Trump pundit or politician hinted that in order for some of the civil unrest the nation's been responding to in various cities and states to disappear, Biden would have to win the election. That'll probably turn out to not be good enough in the long run to keep the break all windows crowd at home.

What would have been certain if Trump had won, though, was that his time on the national stage would have a natural end. He'd serve his four years and then go the way of ex-presidents, especially if they are Republican: To being treated as if they did not exist. The one use to which they are put -- comparison with some current Republican as a way of proving just how crazy Republicans are today -- would clearly not suit the president. Yes, he'd be president and yes, the media would not be able to shut up about him for five seconds and they'd keep shoving his face onto the screen. But after four years it would be over, because there are term limits on presidents.

There are no term limits on whiners. The president can and will, once he leaves office, continue to claim the election was stolen. He'll use it as a launchpad for a 2024 run. He'll never go away now, and everyone who thought they were getting rid of him will find out he'll perform a kind of perverse Obi Wan Kenobi and become more powerful even though they thought he'd been struck down.

And his opponents have only themselves to thank.