Donald Trump’s Day of Reckoning

Susan Glasser: “For four years—and, really, for his whole life—Trump had managed to avoid this moment. In the three days since Election Night, with the race still uncalled but leaning Biden’s way, the President had raged on Twitter, fumed in private, and publicly claimed victory, even as the race was slipping away from him. ‘STOP THE COUNT!’ he insisted, on Thursday. But they didn’t. And, by the end of Friday, not only were the votes still being counted, but they pointed to a result, a decisive, declarative, inarguable result: the 2020 Presidential election was over, and Donald Trump had lost.”

“The official end did not come for a few more agonizing hours, until just before eleven-thirty on Saturday morning, when the Associated Press and the television networks finally made the call. In a fitting coda to four years of his trollish rule, Trump had tweeted less than an hour earlier, ‘I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!’ Then he went golfing. But the Constitution does not include a provision for sore losers. It does not matter whether Trump concedes: Biden has won.”