Donald Trump had a phenomenal night on Tuesday.  He received five million more votes than in 2016, expanded his support from minority voters, and lifted Republican House candidates and state legislatures across the country to victory.  Republicans won almost everywhere, and the president's vote leads in battleground states seemed insurmountable and secured.  A wall of voters showed up for the president in order to prevail over a "margin of fraud" universally expected by Trump's base.  In any other election year, Biden would have conceded by 9 P.M.  Instead, the news media refused to call races for the president, Democrats continued to inject uncontrolled mail-in ballots into the count, and Democrat-governed states turned a Trump landslide into a loss.  In other words, about the only Republican who ended up losing in 2020 is the only Republican responsible for getting voters to turn out in the first place.  That sure makes sense.

The good thing is that we can trust the outcome of the election to be legitimate because really honorable people have told me so.  I heard Ben Sasse and Pat Toomey assure me that if the Democrats had committed voting fraud, those same Democrats would have reported themselves by now.  That must be true.  Mitt Romney has argued for six months that millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots without voter identification or signature requirements would never be used for fraudulent purposes, and why wouldn't I believe Mitt Romney?  He was the only Republican, after all, with so much moral backbone that he voted to remove the president for his opponents' crimes.  That guy is above reproach.  

I saw the major news networks cut away from live remarks by the president of the United States because he was questioning how his leads in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan could disappear in the middle of the night with unexplained vote dumps for his opponent.  The same media establishment that has spent four years calling the 2016 election stolen and illegitimate is worried that Americans might believe that the 2020 election is stolen and illegitimate.  Nothing strange about that.  It's the media's job to decide what we hear and how we think, and I certainly have no right to consider conflicting opinions from the elected president.  Mika Brzezinski told me that once.  Television journalists are like brave firefighters running into burning buildings on our behalf, so whatever evidence they choose to burn in the process should totally be left to their discretion.  They may be Democrats, and they may have all fallen for the Democrats' Russia disinformation hoax for four solid years, but they definitely don't take sides.  They've said so.  

I mean, if people had evidence of mail-in ballots for Biden being illegally backdated after the election or post office employees trashing Trump ballots, that information would be easy to find in a free country.  It's not as if Biden has ever boasted about having the "most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization" in American history.  Surely Google, Twitter, and Facebook can be trusted not to censor important stories.  Because once companies that control the "town square" start censoring points of view, then free speech disappears faster than an Iron Curtain thudding to the ground.  If Big Tech companies were to censor conservative speech in order to affect a presidential election, then they would constitute a clear and present danger to Americans' freedoms.  A person who is targeted for his thoughts and persecuted for his words isn't free; he's a subject.  Amazon's Washington Post has been warning Americans for years that "democracy dies in darkness," so the last thing Big Tech would want to do is strangle the flow of information and keep us all blind.  Americans aren't exactly known for peaceably submitting to anything or anyone for very long.  Sooner or later, they rebel.  

If Democrats looking into alleged Democrat ballot fraud find no Democrat crimes; and Democrat news anchors hold off on calling states for Trump until they've flipped days later for Biden; and Democrat social media companies censor online discussions questioning how it's possible for the president to expand his vote shares in states like Florida and Ohio and in Democrat precincts across the country while simultaneously losing in Rust Belt states run by Democrats after late-breaking vote bursts for Biden magically appear, then Republicans surely have nothing to worry about.  The same Democrats who call for rounding up Trump voters for punishment should be trusted to pursue the truth with openness and transparency.  That just makes sense.

All this talk about stolen elections is probably another conservative conspiracy theory.  Is it really likely that Democrats raised billions of dollars in dark money to take advantage of a national health emergency by pushing mass mail-in balloting upon the country and orchestrating the largest vote fraud operation in U.S. history?  Would establishment Republicans really sit back and let that happen without blaring the alarm over the last few months and guarding against it?  Would news reporters who write about foreign election-tampering for a living ignore election interference at home?  Would American tech companies sabotage an American president who sees China as an enemy simply because those companies have enormous financial interests in China themselves?

That sounds like rubber-room ranting to me.  I mean, for all those people and entities to get together and repeatedly stab an American president in broad daylight would be the stuff of myths and legends, the kind of story that would be told over and over again to rally people against their tormentors.  If Americans started thinking Big Media, Big Tech, and Big Government had conspired to take down a president, then things couldn't just go back to normal.  It would be pretty difficult to get conservatives to care about Nikki Haley's 2024 presidential ambitions when elections are the last things on their minds.  It might even be pretty difficult for Republican voters to care about Republican run-off elections in the Senate, when Republicans in the Senate have done more to prop up false claims of Russian collusion against the president than they have to bring the perpetrators of those false claims to justice.  There's only so much corruption in Washington that normal Americans can pretend to ignore before deciding that all those honorable men and women in Washington aren't so honorable after all.  

The kicker is that stealing an election from Donald Trump is the last thing any group of wannabe tyrants should desire because when people feel ripped off, they tend to get obstinate.  Without so much fraud and doubt injected into the election, the president's supporters would have moved on to a new leader down the road.  Now all those Trump children become likely favorites in future primaries, squeezing out establishment darlings who otherwise might succeed.  When Don Jr. or Ivanka generates more enthusiasm than Rubio or Haley, maybe taking down the president won't seem so smart after all.

But I'm sure this election was completely aboveboard.  All the best people say it's so.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.