Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA
In the LA Times today, Nick Goldberg asks the question on everybody’s mind:
What exactly are we witnessing here? Is this an attempted coup — a real effort by President Trump to cling to power despite the outcome of the election? Or is it a pathetic, doomed-to-fail tantrum by a petulant sore loser who will soon cave under pressure?
It’s neither. The real answer requires us to take seriously what so many of us have been saying all along: Donald Trump is mentally unbalanced. To put it a little more conventionally, he’s such an extreme narcissist that he can’t believe he lost. He literally can’t believe he lost. So his brain makes up stories for him, and the only plausible story in the face of hard numbers is that his enemies cheated. So that’s what he believes. And he’ll believe it forever. There’s no more chance of changing his mind on this than there is of changing the mind of someone in an asylum who believes he’s Jesus Christ.
As usual, though, this leads us back to the real question: Why is nearly the entire Republican Party humoring him on this? Since they aren’t collectively insane, the only answer is that they’re willing to sacrifice the public’s belief in democracy for short-term partisan gain. That isn’t nuts. It’s just despicable.
