A new crop of books about Donald Trump and his final days in office is set to be published in the coming months. One such book, "The Divider: Trump in the White House," from veteran reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, was excerpted in The New Yorker on Monday morning, complete with a previously unpublished resignation letter from General Mark Milley, Trump's final secretary of defense.

After mostly refraining from publicly criticizing Trump, top Trump officials are now running to make their disagreements with him clear. In response, Trump now says the men who he once boasted were "my generals" are "very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system."

As the Executive Editor at Texas National Security Review, noted, the excerpt paints an image of a Trump White House that is "chilling."

Here are the 4 most explosive revelations from the excerpt into Trump's war with his generals.

As many probably imagined was uttered during his White House tenure, Donald Trump reportedly searched for ways to be more like Adolf Hitler.

1. "Why can't you be like the German generals?"

"You fucking generals, why can't you be like the German generals?" a frustrated Trump reportedly asked his chief of staff, John Kelly.

"Which generals?" Kelly asked.

"The German generals in World War II," Trump responded.

"You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?" Kelly reminded the president.

"No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him," Trump insisted.

After Trump demanded the military be sent in to clear the Black Lives Matters protesters, Trump's generals refused.

"You are all losers! You are all f***ing losers!" Trump lashed out, according to the book. "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?"

2. "Look, I don't want any wounded guys in the parade. This doesn't look good for me"

After returning from his trip to France in 2017, Trump raved about the Bastille Day parade in Paris and told Kelly, "You are going to be doing this next year."

As was reported at the time, Trump ordered his people to immediately get to work on planning the "biggest, grandest military parade ever for the Fourth of July." Trump had a very specific aesthetic in mind for his military parade.

"Look, I don't want any wounded guys in the parade," Trump made clear to Kelly about the members of the armed services selected to participate. "This doesn't look good for me."

"Those are the heroes,' Kelly told Trump. "In our society, there's only one group of people who are more heroic than they are — and they are buried over in Arlington."

Trump reportedly remained unmoved: "I don't want them. It doesn't look good for me."

3. Gen. Milley's unsent resignation letter

The New Yorker published a resignment letter from Gen. Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country's top military official, in its entirety. But Miley did not resign in the end.

In his letter, Milley told Trump, "You are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people — and we are trying to protect the American people."

"I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people," Milley wrote. "The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people."

He continued: "It's now obvious to me that you don't understand that world order. You don't understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that."

4. Mike Pompeo privately doubted Trump's Big Lie

Baker and Glasser detail what they call an "extraordinary arrangement" in the weeks after the election between Mike Pompeo, Trump's secretary of state, and General Milley. The two held daily morning phone calls with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in an attempt to keep Trump from going off the rails with his Big Lie.

"'The crazies have taken over,'" Mr. Pompeo told General Milley during a conversation after the election at General Milley's kitchen table, according to the authors.

If there was ever a time to hit the panic button in the Biden era, Monday was that day.

Monday marked one week before so-called moderates in the House of Representatives attempt to force a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure package passed at the center of President Biden's Build Back Better agenda. With his approval ratings stalling due to the double hits of a lackluster response to the delta variant and continued vaccine hesitancy holding down economic recovery, along with a messy withdrawal from Afghanistan that included the fatal drone bombing of 10 civilians, mostly children, Biden is now facing threats of sabotage from the very people with whom he made a political bed for decades in D.C.

Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona were out on Monday with a pair of demands for their fellow Democrats facing a confluence of deadlines, both real and arbitrary. Manchin, the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who has reportedly sought to "remake President Biden's climate legislation in a way that tosses a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry," now says he would like to delay action on Biden's agenda until 2022. That's just ahead of the midterm elections, so we all know Manchin's suggestion is the fast lane to nowhere. Sinema, for her part, is throwing a last-minute wrench in negotiations to take up for Big Pharma in opposing Democrats' plans to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices directly.

Also on Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear oral arguments in the case against Missippi's abortion law in December, likely dismantling the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade by June. Just weeks before, the high court laid the groundwork for this when it upheld Texas' ban on abortions. At least one abortion provider in the state has already been sued.

Monday was also the day that Senate Democrats, rebuffed by the Senate Parliamentarian the day before, frantically introduced an attempt at a legislative workaround to the ruling that granting legal status to immigrants isn't budgetary, and thus can't be included in the filibuster-proof reconciliation bill. Never mind that in 2005, the Republican-controlled Senate used reconciliation to pass immigration reforms citing citizenship as a significant economic and budgetary issue, because Manchin and Sinema have decided that defending a relic of Senate rules is more important than defending Democrats' majorities in Congress — or even democracy for that matter. (Republicans even fired the Senate Parlimentarian in 2001 after he ruled against one of their tax cut proposals.)

Immigration matters, as the world saw on Monday with images of U.S. border patrol agents whipping their horse reigns as they corraled Haitian migrants back into the Rio Grande at the Texas border with Mexico, under a Democratic administration, too. Thanks to a cadre of radical right-wing justices pushed onto the federal bench by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell during Donald Trump's presidency, the Biden administration is forced to implement Trump's extraordinarily draconian Remain in Mexico policy which prohibits asylum seekers from entering the U.S. while awaiting review. Now the Biden administration has enlisted the Defense Department to help in one of the fastest, large-scale expulsions of refugees from the United States in decades.

So where is #TheResistance?

For the most part, moderate members of the Democratic caucus in Congress were not flooded at their home districts during the August recess, even as they very publicly threatened to hijack Biden's agenda. Activists like those with Rev. William Barber's People's Campaign have consistently applied pressure to Democrats like Manchin, but without the masses in the streets protesting the horrific images of Haitians hunted on horseback under the Biden administration with the same fervor present when protesting kids in cages under Trump, it's little surprise things stay the same.

"The policies that are being enactednow and the horrible treatment of these innocent people who have come to the border must stop immediately," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., calling the practice "xenophobic," said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. "We must allow asylum seekers to present their claims at our ports of entry and he afforded due process."

A march for citizenship on Tuesday in Washington D.C. aligns Schumer with House progressive and Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Democrats are not in disarray, in fact, they are more unified they have ever been; they're just being held hostage.

"I have been working hard on my portion of it," Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told reporters of the multi-trillion dollar reconciliation package. "If it's actually going to happen, we're doing pretty well. So but I, you know, I mean, go ask Manchin or Sinema."

The chaos we are currently watching in Washington, D.C. comes down to the personal interest of these two.

Manchin currently maintains ownership stakes in two coal companies that he founded, including one run by his son, Joe Manchin IV. The senior "Manchin has personally grossed more than $4.5 million from those firms," The Intercept reported. Former Manchin aides with fossil fuel industry clients are able to directly lobby the senator. The same pattern is present with Sinema's newfound opposition to Medicare drug price negotiations despite it's overwhelming popularity across the partisan divide. (Even Donald Trump talked big about lower prescription drug prices.)

In 2009 there were 60 Democratic Senators (briefly). Now, a dozen years later, it is an epic struggle to get the country to elect 50 Democratic senators, after a decade in which the GOP descended into open white fascism. This trendline looks ominous. The flaw in the "Vote Blue No Matter Who" electoral strategy is that what gerrymandered maps and politically polarized sorting leaves us with too often is razor-thin margins where the Who really does matter. Sure Republicans didn't repeal Obamcare when they had control of Congress under Trump, but they passed the main priorities for both of their bases: corporate tax cuts and stacking the federal bench with conservative judges.

The donors can't be the only people Democrats in Congress are afraid of. The time is now for #TheResistance to make its return back to the streets — before it's too late.

There is little doubt that the pandemic has exacerbated the fears parents have about their children's well-being. The typical parental anxiety now comes with worries about the latest delta variant of COVID-19 —which appears to spread more easily in children than the initial coronavirus outbreak — questions on whether their children are going to have to wear masks when they go back to school, and anticipation for a yet-to-be approved vaccine for children under 12.

Over a year ago, Salon's Andrew O'Hehir described the mad scramble to reopen schools without a vaccine or coherent safety standards as "a 'Deer Hunter'-style game of Russian roulette, played blindfolded under conditions of complete chaos." One year later, Donald Trump is out of the White House but Republican and Democratic executives alike are all rushing to reopen schools — even as children under 12 are still not cleared to be inoculated despite an 84% jump in the number of children contracting COVID-19 last week alone.

On Thursday, the U.S. set a single-day record for the number of children admitted to a hospital with COVID-19, with 261 children, some less than 1 year old, admitted to U.S. hospitals according to updated HHS figures. Anecdotally, Patricia Darnauer, the administrator for LBJ Hospital in Houston, noted that an 11-month-old girl had to be airlifted more than 170 miles away on Thursday because no pediatric hospitals would accept her. "We looked at all five major pediatric hospital groups and none [had beds] available." As of Sunday, there were only six ICU beds left in the 11-county Austin region.

Pediatric doctors in Texas have taken to Twitter to vent their concerns about rising cases of COVID in very young children. Dr. Heather Haq, a pediatrician at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, said she and her colleagues have been called on to work mandatory overtime shifts because the hospital also has "winter-level patient volumes of acutely ill infants/toddlers with" respiratory syncytial virus (RSV.)

"We're heading into dark times," Texas Medical Center CEO Bill McKeon said last week.

"If children are not masking in schools, it will be a major problem," Dr. Christina Propst told Houston's KTRK in a plea for mask mandates. Recently, Texas overtook New York in terms of total statewide deaths. But Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has banned such mandated precautions — even though we've already seen big camp and daycare outbreaks all summer with the delta variant. And inoculations are severely lagging among teenagers for whom the vaccine is available.

"No governmental entity can compel any individual to receive a Covid-19 vaccine administered under an emergency use authorization," Abbott said in an executive order. "No person may be required by any jurisdiction to wear or to mandate the wearing of a face covering."

The Texas Education Agency said last week that schools don't have to inform parents of positive cases or conduct contact tracing; parents can choose to send a student to school if he or she has been in close contact with a COVID positive case. The agency argued that such precautions will not be required because of "the data from 2020-21 showing very low COVID-19 transmission rates in a classroom setting and data demonstrating lower transmission rates among children than adults."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that everyone — students, teachers, staff and visitors — wear masks in schools. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, blasted the CDC guidance as "inconsistent" and "unscientific" before banning their required use indoors. Florida currently leads the nation in kids hospitalized for COVID-19, with 32 pediatric hospitalizations per day between July 24 and 30 (a rate of 0.76 children hospitalized per 100,000 residents), CDC data shared with The Tampa Bay-Times shows.

"Why would we have the government force masks on our kids when many of these kids are already immune through prior infection," DeSantis, notably not an immunologist, questioned just as the Sunshine State broke a COVID record, reporting more than 21,000 new cases in residents under 19 years old. He has threatened to withhold funding from districts that require masks. As the New York Times reported over the weekend:

Mr. DeSantis has been unyielding in his approach to the pandemic, refusing to change course or impose restrictions despite uncontrolled spread and spiking hospitalizations — an approach that forced him to undertake the biggest risk of his rising political career.

DeSantis' bigfooting on mask mandates is now even being called out by other Republicans. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., conceded on CNN Sunday, "I do disagree with Gov. DeSantis. The local officials should have control here."

It's hard to watch the actions of Republican executives like Abbott and DeSantis in recent weeks and not conclude that the GOP's death cult has worked its way down to the children. After all, the Republican response to the coronavirus has been, in every facet, a method of leveraging, not solving, the pandemic. The delta variant — more aggressively spread in children — looks to be no different.

In Florida, the state school board backed DeSantis while using the pandemic to prop up charter schools with taxpayer funds, providing vouchers to students who face mask requirements. See the plan here? Schools become so unsafe and inhospitable that parents are forced to push their children into private schools. It's a playbook as old as white flight from school desegregation under the guise of religious freedom. It's why conservatives have spent the pandemic rehashing the culture wars on new fronts — so-called critical race theory in schools and trans students in sports — while preventing all of the measures that would have likely meant a much safer return to in-person learning this fall. Republicans are using children as political pawns again. This time it is most certainly a matter of life and death.

Republicans had a golden opportunity to finally kick Donald Trump to the curb after Jan. 6. Instead, the majority of elected Republicans, both in Congress and across the country, have stood by him. They've spent the last five months steamrolling over anyone who dares to speak out against him or in defense of democratic norms. Fealty to Trump has become the latest battle line in the ongoing GOP civil war. That's how we've ended up with Liz Cheney criticizing the Republican Party from the left.

"We can't whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump's big lie," the Wyoming Republican and the No. 3 House GOP leader, said Monday at the annual retreat for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "It is a threat to democracy. What he did on January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed."

One of just 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump in January, Cheney hasn't let up on her continued criticism of his campaign to undermine the last election. It's made her an apparent target of the leader of Republicans in the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. McCarthy said in a "Fox & Friends" interview on Tuesday that Cheney's colleagues in the House have "no concern about how she voted on impeachment," but fret about "her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message.

McCarthy was caught on a hot mic telling "Fox & Friends" co-host Steve Doocey that "I think she's got real problems."

"I've had it with her," McCarthy went on about Cheney. "You know, I've lost confidence."

As another House Republican, Rep. Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, better summed up the situation, "If a prerequisite for leading our conference is continuing to lie to our voters, then Liz is not the best fit." Cheney's betting on surviving this battle, even if she loses her leadership seat in the House, as Salon's Heather Digby Parton recently explained:

This week Cheney herself refused to rule out a 2024 presidential bid, and it's obvious her strategy is to run on her new reputation as the tough conservative woman who stood up to Donald Trump. It's not a bad plan. Cheney understands politics and realizes that her only hope for the presidency is to be the anti-Trump, in the hopes that his star fades or he decides not to run and she can emerge as the GOP standard-bearer who might be able to lure back some of those suburban women and college-educated white men who had been staunch Republicans until the Trump circus came to town.

The problem with this bet, however, is that there are no signs the GOP has any intention of abandoning Trump, or — more importantly — abandoning their anti-democratic tendencies.

Cheney's father rode into office with George W. Bush after losing the popular vote. The next Republican in the White House to follow, Trump, also lost the popular vote. Neither showed humility about it and the Republicans proudly marched forward relentlessly pursuing their agendas. Biden won the most votes in history and beat Trump by seven million votes despite Republican efforts to disenfranchise and confuse voters. Still, Republicans have the nerve to cry foul and complain. By contrast, we know for a fact that Trump was calling officials in Georgia (and likely every other red state) demanding that they "find" him more votes. We literally have Trump on tape trying to commit election fraud. Lot of good it did. He's still planning on running in 2024. And as of right now, nothing is stopping him.

Liz Cheney's latest comments came in an off-the-record interview with former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Ryan, you'll recall, now sits on the board of Fox News, where one executive told Vanity Fair in 2019, "Paul is embarrassed about Trump and now he has the power to do something about it."

Paul Ryan may have the power to do something about it, but unlike Cheney (who at least voted to impeach Trump) he hasn't. Instead, he's been cashing in at the right-wing network and watched as Tucker Carlson has risen to the top spot by spewing barely diluted white nationalism. Ryan wouldn't even say anything after Trump celebrated Mitt Romney, the man Ryan ran on a presidential ticket with a few short years back, being booed by his hometown crowd. The media-supported myth that Ryan was a serious, responsible lawmaker propped up this malevolent character for far too long.

This is the incentive problem in the so-called conservative movement that no one seems to want to grapple with. A similar, but not identical, incentive structure led the Washington Post to host Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley for a livestream on Tuesday, where the Republican defended raising his fist in solidarity with a mob that would eventually rush the Capitol armed with weapons and in search of his colleagues. He went on to complain that he was being canceled when a Post reporter merely attempted to correct the record about his continued mischaracterization of the election in Pennsylvania, a state that was specifically targeted with misinformation by the Trump campaign. It's why CNN's Don Lemon hosted Pennsylvania's former Republican senator, Rick Santorum, after the conservative pundit baselessly asserted that Native American culture is not American culture.

Trump told conservatives that "I am your voice" in his Republican National Convention speech in 2016. He wasn't wrong. Trump's brand of fascist politics is merely a symptom of American conservatism. Anyone in Republican leadership could have put their foot down and said something and even done something about anything the Trump administration did. Instead, they enabled it and now want the positive press.

"We're in! Let's go, keep it moving, baby!" shouted Derrick Evans, a newly elected Republican member of West Virginia's House of Delegates, as he is seen pushing his way through the rotunda at the U.S. Capitol with a throng of violent Trump supporters in a video live-streamed on Facebook.

"Trump, Trump, Trump!" he chanted as attackers rushed the doors.

The video, deleted by Evans after circulating Twitter, shows him donning a helmet and military gear, shouting, "Derrick Evans is in the Capitol [...] Patriots inside, baby!"

Evans, 34, won his first term as a state lawmaker in November and was charged by the Department of Justice on Friday for illegally entering the Capitol. He is one of several elected Republican lawmakers across the country who have been identified as either participating in or aiding violent pro-Trump attacks on legislative bodies this week.

Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase, who describes herself as "Trump in heels," spoke at the rally that preceded the riot on Wednesday. She later praised the rioters and blamed the violence on "antifa or BLM agents of destruction," for which her Facebook account was suspended on Friday. After Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem posted photos of himself at Trump's rally, he continued to push a baseless conspiracy theory — that anti-fascist activists, not Trump supporters, broke into the Capitol — which had already been debunked by the Department of Justice.

Missouri state lawmaker Rep. Justin Hill skipped his own swearing-in ceremony to travel to Trump's coup, where he admits he sat back and watched as an angry mob descended on the U.S. Capitol. Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a retired military colonel who said he helped organize a bus ride to the demonstrations, posed for photos with former Republican state representative Rick Saccone, who served for 18 years in the U.S. Air Force.

"We're storming the Capitol!" Saccone said in a video he posted to Facebook. "They broke down the gates!" he continued. "They're macing them up there. We're trying to run out all of the evil people and all the RINOs that have betrayed our president. We're going to run them out of their offices!"

Oregon Republican Rep. Mike Nearman was caught on video opening a door to protestors who rushed into the state Capitol in Salem on Dec. 21. Some rioters then sprayed six law enforcement officers with a chemical substance and others violently attacked journalists.

In light of his actions, West Virginia officials are now calling for Evans' hasty prosecution and resignation.

The West Virginia Democratic Party declared in a statement, "[Evans] must be held accountable for participating in an act of insurrection against the United States government and risking the lives of lawmakers and Capitol police." The Party added, "The West Virginia Democratic Party calls for his immediate resignation from the House of Delegates and that he be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." A Change.org petition, with over 50,000 signatories, has also called for Evans' immediate removal from office.

Roger Hanshaw, the speaker of the West Virginia's House of Delegates, said Evans will have to "answer to his constituents and colleagues regarding his involvement in what has occurred today."

Evans responded to sharp rebukes online by claiming that he did not participate in any violence or destruction of property, and defended his involvement in the riot as "an independent member of the media." He added, "I want to assure you all that I did not have any negative interactions with law enforcement."

Evans' attorney John H. Bryan toldNBC that his client "did nothing wrong." Bryan explained, "He was exercising his First Amendment rights to peacefully protest and film a historic and dynamic event [...] He engaged in no violence, no rioting, no destruction of property, and no illegal behavior."

Mitch McConnell never acted as if Barack Obama were a legitimate president. More than a decade later, the Senate majority leader has decided to the best use of Republican resources is to humor Donald Trump's delusion that he won an election he clearly lost. McConnell's desperate play appears to be a grift meant to fire up Republican voters ahead of a pair of critical Senate runoff races in Georgia. But what if that plan backfires? Trump's attacks on America's electoral system could just as easily depress GOP turnout.

Joe Biden is on track to win 306 Electoral College votes, the same number Trump received when he was elected four years ago. As Salon's Roger Sollenberger has reported, none of the half-dozen or so lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign in states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and Georgia since Election Day have presented any evidence of systemic irregularities, or any information that could even hypothetically reverse Trump's electoral defeat. So while our tax dollars are at work defending against meritless lawsuits by an outgoing president, the Republican civil war has suddenly reignited with a new round of finger-pointing and recrimination.

McConnell took to the Senate floor on Monday to argue that "President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options." While several reports suggest that McConnell's anti-democratic strategy is meant to appease Trump and fire up his base, there is already evidence that points to a real risk of depressing Republican voters.

Trump's campaign has seized on news that fewer than 400 ballots had not been scanned over the weekend in Atlanta to stir up cries of voter fraud. In reaction, Georgia's two Republican senators, both facing Jan. 5 runoffs against Democratic challengers, have demanded the resignation of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican. Raffensperger has dared to deny allegations of voter fraud and pointed out some simple arithmetic: Biden leads by 11,595 votes in Georgia, and that's highly unlikely to change in Trump's favor with a recount. Georgia's voter suppression tactics already mean that elections are heavily rigged in Republicans' favor, so the Democratic turnout this year is all the more notable.

"There have been too many failures in Georgia elections this year and the most recent election has shined a national light on the problems," Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue said in the statement, which did not list a single example of any such problems. "The Secretary of State has failed to deliver honest and transparent elections." All reports and indications suggest, however, that the Georgia election was clean and clear, with no major irregularities.Republicans are essentially calling the voters of Georgia cheaters and their fellow Republicans corrupt in pathetic attempts to align themselves with a president who refuses to accept their own votes. McConnell and the majority of the Republican Party are egging Trump on at the expense of their own voters. They are at once getting Republican voters' hopes up for some miracle — and also convincing them their votes don't count. Deflating the GOP base while riling up the Democratic base with Trump's refusal to concede seems an ill-conceived strategy going into a crucial runoff race.

Trump's showing last Tuesday shows that many of his voters only come out to support him, not the GOP as a whole. While plenty of loyal Republicans will still come out in Georgia with control of the Senate on the line, I suspect a good number won't bother now that the president GOP voters adore has said that America's elections are rigged. Democrats, meanwhile, sense an unusual opportunity to turn out even more voters, including those who may not have voted on Nov. 3 because they assumed Georgia would remain red no matter what — and now they have an opportunity to reshape power in Washington.

Take, for instance, the message from former Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who posted a video to social media where she appealed to God to "SMASH the clay jar of deceit in America. SMASH the clay jar of delusion in the United States of America. SMASH the delusion, Father, that Joe Biden is our president. He is not." Extremist rhetoric like that is likely why 70% of Republicans now say they don't believe the 2020 election was free and fair, compared to the 35% who held similar beliefs before the election.

On the other side of the coin, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, easily the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, has done multiple Fox News interviews to calm the fears of moderate voters who are reluctant to see Democrats control that body, promising to block any progressive agenda presented by Biden. As usual, Democrats and Republicans are simply not playing the same game.

Trump, meanwhile, is simply playing aggrieved and trying to fleece the rubes one more time while he still holds office, telling his worshipers that the system is out to get him. It's a distinctly odd thing for the president of the United States to say, but he continues to schedule rallies and raise funds — same grift, different day. All this will work just about as well as his "big, beautiful wall" on the Mexican border, his long-promised replacement for the Affordable Care Act and all the promises to throw agents of the "deep state" in prison. the Great Mexican Wall, the ACA replacement and all the deep state lockups. But even if Republicans lose in the short term, they're setting the stage for new restrictions on voting in states they control by pointing to Trump's false claims of fraud. Much the same thing happened after 2016, paving the way for the new voting rules that helped create the confusion of 2020.

None of us have seen a year like 2020 — and now it has finally snapped the tether that seemed to hold it to the realm of reality. After a relatively calm Election Day, leading into a nail-biter evening that left the result very much in doubt, President Trump did exactly what many observers feared he might do, prematurely declaring victory over former vice president Joe Biden, even though millions of votes in several important states remain uncounted.

It was a rambling, incoherent and extraordinary speech even by Trump's standards, delivered in an extraordinary setting — the East Room of the White House, rather than a campaign headquarters at a Washington hotel, as would be traditional for an incumbent president running for re-election. Whether it represents a genuine attempt to subvert democracy or was just an example of "Trump being Trump" and letting off some steam depends on one's perspective. Vice President Mike Pence attempted to assert the latter interpretation, arriving on stage after Trump had concluded and making relatively normal remarks about "the integrity of the vote," while of course praising Trump in fulsome terms and urging him to "make America great again, again."

None of us have seen a year like 2020 — and now it has finally snapped the tether that seemed to hold it to the realm of reality. After a relatively calm Election Day, leading into a nail-biter evening that left the result very much in doubt, President Trump did exactly what many observers feared he might do, prematurely declaring victory over former vice president Joe Biden, even though millions of votes in several important states remain uncounted.

It was a rambling, incoherent and extraordinary speech even by Trump's standards, delivered in an extraordinary setting — the East Room of the White House, rather than a campaign headquarters at a Washington hotel, as would be traditional for an incumbent president running for re-election. Whether it represents a genuine attempt to subvert democracy or was just an example of "Trump being Trump" and letting off some steam depends on one's perspective. Vice President Mike Pence attempted to assert the latter interpretation, arriving on stage after Trump had concluded and making relatively normal remarks about "the integrity of the vote," while of course praising Trump in fulsome terms and urging him to "make America great again, again."

"This is a fraud on the American public," Trump said, with no explanation of what that fraud might entail

Minutes after Trump falsely claimed, "As far as I am concerned we already have won it" — meaning the entire presidential election — the Associated Press called Arizona for Biden, the first state in a long and tense election night to flip from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020. While the outcome is by no means decided, losing Arizona makes Trump's path to victory exceptionally difficult

"We want all voting to stop," Trump added, asserting that it was "clear" he had won close swing states like Georgia and North Carolina, which have not yet been called by any major media outlet. "They knew they couldn't win," Trump claimed — without identifying the "they" in question — "so they said, 'Let's go to court.'"

In the realm of reality, all voting has ended. It's only a question of collecting and counting the votes, a process that differs widely from state to state and can sometimes take days or weeks. In this year of pandemic, that process is undeniably complicated, and millions of votes remain uncounted in key states like Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which now appear certain to decide the presidential election. Trump's attempt to claim there is something nefarious about the process flies in the face of election law, democratic norms and political history. One might be excused for asking what else is new.

Ironically, the president's comments will almost certainly hurt his legal team's chances in court — the path to potential re-election that Trump has long telegraphed he is banking on. Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who has been a frequent Trump confidant and adviser, said on ABC News that the president's extraordinary White House speech was "a bad strategic decision. It is a bad political decision."

That remains to be seen. Trump's gambit is certainly a terrible idea and an overtly anti-democratic power play that sent immediate shockwaves through the media and political classes, as inured to Trump's delusional theatrics as they have become. With the loss of Arizona and millions of Democratic-trending mail-in votes yet to be counted in major states, it appears probable that Trump is headed for a narrow electoral defeat — albeit a great deal narrower than most Democrats expected. Given that context, perhaps Trump's vicious election-night surprise is no surprise at all. It's the last and most desperate ploy of a man with no respect for the democratic process and no willingness to accept the verdict of the voters.