It's trendy to suggest that Trump's attempt at stealing the…

First of all, Trump DID manage to rig the 2016 election. The media largely swept that inconvenient fact under the rug when the evidence started to emerge shortly after he "won" because they were too excited at the ratings that a Trump presidency would give them.

But the reality is that Trump's successful theft of the 2016 election was obviously more harmful to the sanctity of our democracy than his failed theft of the 2020 election. It's just that the media now wants to get ratings out of his failed 2020 attempt.

Trump has spent four years systematically chewing at the fabric of every aspect of our democracy. We don't even know what our democracy is going to look like after this. His tantrum about losing, and zero-chance attempt at overturning it, is just a footnote at the end.

We've all known for four years now that if Trump lost the 2020 election, he'd try to overturn it by any illegal means possible. If you were paying attention, you also knew that if he got blown out, he would have zero chance of overturning it. This isn't some gasp-worthy surprise.

We're also supposed to gasp in shock over the fact that so many republicans went along with his attempt at overturning the election. But they've been going along with his criminal antics for four years. This is no worse or different, it's just what the republican party is.

But the media's way of continuing to use Trump for ratings, even after he's gone, is to convince us that his ghost is still going to dominate the next four years. So they have to convince us that he's burned it all down on his way out the door in particular.

From the minute the media declared Biden the winner, they've played up how many votes Trump got, pretended he's going to control the GOP for years to come, ignored his obvious path to prison. They've played up Trump's ghost as being immortal, more powerful than Trump ever was.

The media has us so spun around, many of us are moping around even more hopelessly and fearfully than we would have if Trump had won the election. We've almost been brainwashed into believing that Trump did win the election and that we were defeated.

This isn't a Star Wars movie. We struck Trump down, and he didn't magically become more powerful because of it. He just became weaker and whinier. He broke several laws to try to overturn the election, and he STILL failed at every turn. He's just that crippled now.

"But this sets a precedent for the republicans to try to steal every election!" Sure. If the next presidential election is decided by a few hundred votes, the Supreme Court might give it to the losing republican candidate. Oh wait, that DID happen, in 2000. This is nothing new.

"But the norms and the rule of law have now been destroyed!" Sure, because Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal was on the up and up. Ford's pardon of Nixon was on the up and up. McCarthy's blacklists were on the up and up. Come on, this who the republicans have been for generations.

The republicans have been a full scale fascist party since at least the 1950s. It's just that they used to try to cover up their fascism and law breaking by pretending to care about the most trivial of norms. Now they've just stopped pretending. That's the real difference.

So yeah, it sucks that Trump broke some more things on his way out the door, after we finally threw him out of our house. But it's nothing compared to all the things he broke during the four years that we couldn't get him to leave our house.

If we let the media irrevocably convince us that Trump has permanently destroyed our democracy, then we won't even give Biden a chance to repair it. We'll be too busy shouting down Biden's reforms, instead insisting that it's forever broken. That kind of cynicism is a killer.

Of course the place is busted up. But in the end we put Trump out on his ass. We took down our generation's would-be Hitler in just four years. We're that strong and powerful. We can't afford to turn around now and behave like we're weak and we lost.

It's okay to feel scarred, bruised, weary, tired, bludgeoned. This was the ugly battle of a lifetime. But WE WON. Now we're in power. Let's do something good with it, instead of lamenting about how the guy we just defeated has somehow defeated us.

Put another way: think about how bruising this past month has felt, having to win the election fifty times in a row before it finally stuck. Now imagine being on the side that lost the election fifty times in a row. Those are the people whose ass we kicked.

But really, this comes back to not letting the media and the pundits convince us that lamenting, hand wringing, panicking, and fretting are somehow political activism. They're not. They're waste of your fucking time, if you want to make any kind of difference in the world.

I'm just going to start blocking those of you who reply and insist that Trump is going to start a "civil war" on his way out the door. We don't have time for that kind of hysterical doomsday nonsense. It's clear that some of you are HOPING Trump's side wil start a civil war.

I've tried to be clear over the past few years that I don't want people in my audience who are adrenaline addicts and are (consciously or subconsciously) rooting for Trump to do as much damage as possible, just so they can feel rage toward him. People like that sabotage our goals

Some of you doomsday types insisted Trump would cancel the election, then you insisted he would rig the election, then you insisted the courts would hand him the election. You're always wrong, but you don't care, because you're subconsciously rooting for him to defeat you.

Trump has killed 300,000 Americans. Is that not enough damage for you? You have to make up imaginary damage that he's going to do on top of it, just so you can ratchet your rage against him? How badly have you lost the plot?

Some of you are very upset that you're not getting the big action movie climax you wanted. You're upset that he isn't going to blow something up, or blow himself up, in the end. Sorry, but that's not where this is headed, mercifully.

What I don't get is why you rage types can't just transfer your rage to the next round of republican villains. Are McConnell, Cruz, Graham, Cheney, Crenshaw, and these other creeps not tasty enough for you? Trump is done now. Move on to hating the next villains.

Anyway, we've been in hell for four years, and now we're triumphantly climbing out of it. It's time to heroically take on the remaining bad guys, while rebuilding and moving forward. If that doesn't interest you, then maybe it's time for you to step away from all this.

I don't like telling anyone on our side to step away. But if you're running around at this point yelling about "martial law" and "civil war" and other hallucinatory hysteria, then 1) you need and deserve professional help, and 2) you're greatly harming our cause.

I can see from the replies that a percentage of you are so addicted to foaming at the mouth about Trump, you'll continue to do so long after Trump is off the stage. I'll give you until after the inauguration to shift gears. But after that I don't want you in my audience. Sorry.

I've only spent the past four years hammering away at Trump because he was in a position of power and he was harming us. But he's finished now. There are new battles now that don't involve him. I'm sorry that hurts the feelings of those of you who obsessively love raging at him.

To give you an idea of how fucked up some of your heads are, Barr resigned today and limped away, leaving Trump more crippled than ever, and some of you are spinning it into somehow magically HELPING Trump and Barr? Jesus Christ that's insane faux-logic.

Trump is crippled. He's powerless. He will limp out of office. He will go bankrupt. He will go to prison. He is defeated on every level. It's over for him. And that really irks those of you who would prefer he remain powerful, so you can keep raging at him. Which in turn irks me.

I'm not going to be one of those pundits who tries to keep the ghost of Trump alive long after he's gone, just because I know that some of you are addicted to raging at him. We're already facing new, important battles. I'll be busy fighting those. You can do what you want.

It's trendy to suggest that Trump's attempt at stealing the election has finished off what was left of our democracy. But after everything we've been through in the past four years, I just don't buy that his endgame has been any more harmful than the rest of what he's done to us.

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