It's time Donald Trump lost fair and square--as indications are that he will--and got busy with his new television network or his revolution, whichever comes first.
Typically, he has said different things at different times about the supposed illegitimacy of the election he apparently and understandably expects to lose.
He has said the election is "rigged" against him by the liberal media working to protect Hillary Clinton and spread lies about him. At other times he has said that he actually will get cheated at the polls.
His first whine--about the vast media conspiracy against him--is boilerplate loser stuff. All losers of elections believe the media didn't treat them fairly. Trump is the first to cry foul quite this combatively and pre-emptively.
The truth is that the fault is almost always the candidate's.
No one made Trump tell that guy that he liked to grab women in that place. No one made him behave so boorishly that he turned off and turned away high-income female suburban Republican voters vital to any winning Republican coalition. No one made him mimic a disabled man or attack a plump Miss Universe or assail the parents of a slain military hero or buddy up to the Russians.
Megalomania, narcissism, thinner skin than an onion's--these are personal disorders, not media conspiracies.
Hillary Clinton has whined for decades about an abusive media. But, so far, the WikiLeaks revelations about her simply have been less compelling news stories than the words coming out of Trump's own mouth.
A race that might have been about her ethical failings has instead been about Trump's temperament. A race that might have been close enough for alleged irregularities to matter now probably won't be.
That's the more serious and dangerous and anti-American charge ... Trump's, that is, that he will get cheated at the polls.
By making the allegation, Trump serves his own massive and fragile ego at the expense of undermining the legitimacy of our nation's great democracy with its famous pride in smooth and orderly transfers of power.
Even Richard Nixon, in 1960, declared that he would not challenge disputed returns in Chicago and Texas that delivered an Electoral College victory to John F. Kennedy. Nixon said a lingering dispute "would tear the country apart."
In 2000, Al Gore accepted that the U.S. Supreme Court had delivered the presidency to George W. Bush by denying a full statewide recount in Florida. He could have persisted in pursuing a recount through Florida state courts, but he said the ordeal would not be good for the country.
Now comes Trump, lacking in Nixon's or Gore's grace, to say he's going to be cheated in a race that polls show him losing from four to 11 points.
Trump's allegations are nonsensical, race-based and a reckless open invitation for the more paranoid and primitive of his supporters to intimidate voters in traditional Democratic precincts and foment trouble or even violence on Election Day.
These charges of an electoral conspiracy against Trump are reckless and nonsensical because:
• States run their own elections and more states are Republican-run than Democratic. The key big swing states--Florida and Ohio--are Republican all the way.
• Republicans are the ones who have passed voter-ID laws to stop people from voting as someone else, although a recent study found only 31 examples of that since 2000. That's an uncommonly plodding and inefficient way to try to steal an election, as opposed to, say, official stuffing of ballot boxes.
The Republicans' real point on voter ID obviously was to keep certain people from voting, which, when you think about it, amounts to a sure-enough example of a rigged election.
Trump's charges are race-based because they make much of the fact that, in several inner-city black Philadelphia precincts in 2012, Barack Obama got all the votes.
A shutout in a polling place is prima facie evidence of fraud, Republicans have said. Surely somebody would have voted for Mitt Romney, if merely by mistake, they have argued.
You would think that smarter ballot-stuffers would have thought to give Romney a few votes here and there to avert suspicion.
Anyway, those precincts were tightly compressed, lending to easy Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts for a constituency that favored Obama by 93 percent nationwide.
Even if fraudulent, these precinct shutouts in Philly affected 7 percent of the vote in a few precincts, an insufficient number to change Pennsylvania's outcome.
Beyond that, the Philadelphia Inquirer went door-to-door, canvassing residents in some of those disputed precincts from 2012, and found only professed Obama voters.
So to repeat the point of a previous column: Trump is most dangerous when bested. By his ego disorder, he can't accept or deal with it.
So he reacts as a wounded alpha wolf, willing to maul his own country when it reaches out to try to attend to his bloodied ego.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 10/20/2016