Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for Puckie Miskets and Problem Solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton.

All right, it's been two weeks since the election.

Let's see if Donald Trump has conceded.

Nope, he has not. Still contesting it in the battleground states hoping for a

recount or a Supreme Court Hail Mary pass. There probably won't be a coup, but there's a growing chance Trump will fly around on Air Force

1 until it runs out of gas and then throw the keys in a lake.

I'm actively taking bets on whether he carves his name into the resolute desk and glues all the doors shut before he leaves.

The good news is, we do not live in a Banana Republic yet, so the immediate effects of Trump's intransigence aren't going to

result in the Army and the Navy fighting each other over who they pick as

president. But I gotta tell you, the current scenario isn't good. Here's what's happening at the

surface level. Donald Trump is congenitally incapable of admitting defeat,

and so his ego is dragging out the election because it's easier for him to tell the country the votes were rigged than to tell himself he didn't actually win them. The court challenges the Trump campaign is presently waging, won't do anything, and are the electoral equivalent of a temper tantrum

from a sore loser. That's the surface level. The deeper story here is far more troubling,

because logically there can only be two scenarios at this

point either Donald Trump is right the 2020 election was a fraud and

Joe Biden will be the illegitimate president of a sham democracy.

Or the election was legitimate, meaning that the incumbent president of the United States is either wholly delusional or would rather the American

people lose faith in democracy itself than personally admit defeat.

That's scary to me, because democracy only works if we think it does when countries

really believe that elections are rigged. That's when they give up on elections

and start courting strongmen.

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