Paranoid Trumpophrenia is a disease of the soul as well as of the mind

Modern technology is simply not capable of falsifying or manufacturing enough votes on Election Day to transform a defeat (and especially a "landslide" defeat) into a five to seven million vote victory. It's not just that such a thing would be impossible on a national or even multi-state scale without anybody noticing. It would be absurd to suggest that such a thing was possible even in a single state without anybody not only smelling a rat but being able to prove it.

No person of normal intelligence who is honest and in marginal contact with reality could assert that such a thing happened in 2020. The "case" that it did has been made- or rather, the President's lawyers have attempted to make it- in court after court and in the state after state, and been ridiculed by the judges for its absurdity.

No. Nobody who is not mentally challenged, or psychotic, or maliciously dishonest can suggest that the recent election was in any sense "rigged.' Nor is it at all surprising that a record number of voters showed up at the polls, not to elect Joe Biden, but to get rid of the most unpopular, obviously unfit, and toxic president in modern history, a man whose damage to the country is shown quite clearly in the number of people he has turned not only into sore losers but sore losers who are willing to sacrifice their integrity and the well-being of their country to advance a narrative no sane person could even take seriously. 

We have never before had a president who in four years has failed even once to exceed a 50% approval rating, and who even reached 50%- briefly- only twice. That he spent that time misrepresenting reality and getting his partisans to go along with his lies is what prepared us for this moment. In Trumpworld, anything that one wants to believe is true, no matter how absurd, and whatever one doesn't want to accept is false, no matter how overwhelming the evidence. Donald Trump was emphatically rejected at the polls because most Americans understand what a disaster it is that so many of their neighbors have been corrupted into no longer distinguishing what is true from what they want to be true. And after the past four years, the pathetic and childish behavior of Donald Trump and his followers in the aftermath of his decisive repudiation by the American people is just one more illustration of the belief that lies at the core of Trumpism. It always has: that if the facts are inconvenient, there are always, in Kellyanne Conway's remarkable phrase, "alternative facts."

Eventually, when enough people want badly enough to believe a lie, they manage to convince themselves that it's true-  or at least to pretend that it is. That's what has enabled every dictatorship and authoritarian regime- the kind that is led by the sort of people Donald Trump openly admires- in history. And now Trump has brought about forty percent of us to that very place.

That fact is the direst threat this nation has faced since the Civil War.

He has actually gotten that many Americans to support the first attempted coup- albeit a bloodless and comically inept one- in American history since Aaron Burr. Or at least since Rutherford B. Hayes.

In some ways, I'm shocked most of all by the number of Missouri Synod pastors who have given up their integrity and canceled their subscription to the Eighth Commandment (by the Lutheran and Catholic reckoning; the Ninth, as Reformed Christians number them). I've just unfriended a bunch of them on Facebook. After all, as St. Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 15:33, bad company ruins good morals. I can no longer trust their word- which is not a good thing in a clergyman. 

Better to walk away than to continue to have even Facebook "friends" whom one can no longer respect.