Donald Trump is the sorest loser ever

Back before Joe Biden won the presidential election more than a month ago by a margin approaching 7 million votes, I wrote a column here listing 15 reasons “to not like Donald Trump.” I noted that he is a tax dodger, draft dodger, liar, and “he doesn’t own a dog.”

I am now compelled to add a 16th reason: Donald Trump is perhaps the sorest loser in history. One of the first hard lessons most people learn growing up is that you win some, you lose some. Then you accept either outcome with at least a nodding grace toward your opponent.

Trump, however, never grew up.

He gave us advance warning in August that he wouldn’t accept defeat in 2020, saying “the only way I can lose is if it’s rigged.” So his response — lawsuits, recounts, recounts of recounts, openly courting state legislators to overrule the voters and appoint their own electors — shouldn’t have surprised anyone.

Initially, Trump’s argument was that he was ahead when you went to bed, but behind when you woke up the next day. Yes, and the Atlanta Falcons won the 2017 Super Bowl because they led the New England Patriots 28-6 when you dozed off at the end of the third quarter.

Trump pretends not to understand where these late night votes came from, alleging that they were fraudulent “dumps” inserted by treacherous machines and poll workers. In reality, they were mail-in absentee ballots that Republican legislators in certain states, like Pennsylvania, prohibited from being counted before the same-day ballots.

This was the plan. Trump would race out to an early lead from in-person voting. He could declare victory that night, then fight it out in the ensuing chaos. That didn’t work.

When the race was called for Biden, that’s when we hit the road to full-on Crazytown, with an often-confused Rudy Giuliani at the wheel. Right beside him stood North Carolina’s own Sidney Powell, with arguments so bizarre that they make the craziest JFK assassination theory you ever heard sound like a bedtime story.

From the start, Trump also has played the race card. His fraud charges targeted cities with large African-American populations — Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta. He all but said that because these were black votes they shouldn’t count. (In fact, it was women in the suburbs that tipped the crucial swing states for Biden).

I voted against Trump in 2016 because I thought him manifestly unqualified — morally, intellectually, temperamentally, ethically — to be president. But he won. He served for four years, and I am forced to admit that had he not horribly mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic that has so far killed more than a quarter million Americans and cratered our economy, he stood a good chance of being re-elected.

But, as President-elect Biden might put it, here’s the deal: he lost. He lost the electoral college by the same margin that he won it in 2016. He got less than 47% of the popular vote for the second time, losing ultimately by almost 7 million votes. In the end, it wasn’t that close.

Who knows what Donald Trump really believes? We do know (thanks to reporting in The Washington Post) that since the election he has raised $170 million, mostly from small-dollar donors, much of it available to him personally for whatever he chooses to do with it. So, other than the national interest, there’s no incentive for him to tamp down the belief that he will, in fact, be inaugurated next month.

He won’t be. Despite Trump’s best efforts, every contested state has certified its vote for Biden. Courts have tossed out dozens of Trump suits. His own head of election cybersecurity, Christopher Krebs, pronounced the 2020 election the “most secure in history,” which spurred Trump to fire him in an angry Tweet. And a full month after the election, his own Attorney General, William Barr, finally concluded there is no evidence of fraud that would change the election’s outcome.

He lost. Yet the vast majority of our elected Republican officials, including North Carolina’s own senators — most of whom know the truth — won’t even acknowledge, much less publicly congratulate, the newly, and duly elected president of the United States.

Is Trump really this powerful? Or are the people we are electing to office these days just so weak, so easily bullied that they can’t even open an umbrella in a downpour because some blowhard who just lost a big election says the sun is shining?

Personally, I think it’s the latter. We should remember their names. And we should never let them forget where they stood and what they didn’t say when the country desperately needed responsible adults to step up and stop these dangerous childish fits of the sorest loser ever.

Contributing columnist John Huey is former Editor-in-Chief of Time Inc. and has worked as a journalist for almost 50 years.