And I Alone Am Escaped Alive To Tell Thee!

Swing States that have found massive VOTER FRAUD, which is all of them, CANNOT LEGALLY CERTIFY these votes as complete & correct without committing a severely punishable crime. Everybody knows that dead people, below age people, illegal immigrants, fake signatures, prisoners,....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2020

....place in Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. In all Swing State cases, there are far more votes than are necessary to win the State, and the Election itself. Therefore, VOTES CANNOT BE CERTIFIED. THIS ELECTION IS UNDER PROTEST!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2020

I have a fairly high tolerance for foolishness. I can usually see where outlandish claims have some semblance of reason to them, some measure of not-quite-entirely-batshit about them.  But this defies me.  This is Sidney Powell/Kraken/The CIA is behind EVERYTHING!!! level insanity.  It doesn't even have an arguable internal logic to it.

First, certifying the vote is not a criminal act if you don't like what is certified.  Criminal acts require actualy criminal statutes making those acts criminal; otherwise, bad as the action may be, it is not criminal, by definition.  QED, and all that.  But no state has found "massive VOTER FRAUD" because none of Trump's lawyer, up to and including Giuliani, have gone to court alleging fraud.* Those that have, like Powell, are tossed out of court not because of some "technicality" like standing, but because they have no evidence, and don't pretend to.  Their suits are fishing expeditions hopeful of finding the fraud they say is hidden in plain sight.  Which applies to the "everybody knows" statement, that comes next.  Nobody knows that, because it simply isn't true.  All of that middle tweet is a stew of lies and fevered imaginations, especially the "roughed up Republican poll watchers."  Who?  When?  Where?

But it's when he realizes that the "more votes than people voting" is old news, that he's been there, done that, and nobody's buying his t-shirts, that he is pushed to complete incomprehensibility.  This one I can't straighten out:

In all Swing State cases, there are far more votes than are necessary to win the State, and the Election itself. Therefore, VOTES CANNOT BE CERTIFIED. THIS ELECTION IS UNDER PROTEST!

"[M]ore votes than are necessary to win the State"?  Huh?  What does that even mean?  And because of that "VOTES CANNOT BE CERTIFIED".  SORRY, THEY...oh, sorry....they already have been.  EOD.  The Electoral College votes today.  It's done.

Barr was right; these are the mad rantings of the deposed king.  We really shouldn't take Trump any more seriously than that.  Honestly, if democracy in America is so delicate it can be undone by some tweets or even a stupid and almost-immediately rejected application to the Supreme Court, we're done for anyway.

It's really cute he thinks typing it in a tweet in all-caps somehow makes it an official protest.  As the courts have said 59 times now:  it's too late to protest when the election is over.  Trump's problem is not with how the election was conducted; it's with what it decided.  But that's what elections do:  decide winners and, by necessity, losers.

Trump is a loser.  QED.

*Actually, it's worse than that.  If Trump would stand still to ask a question, prefaced properly this could be a good one:

It has become an article of faith among ardent Trump followers that the election was stolen. The president continues to insist that this is the case, and these flames were further fanned by 19 Republican-controlled state governments, along with 126 Republican members of Congress, who joined the meritless Texas lawsuit, tossed out by the Supreme Court on Friday. The rationalization behind that stunt was that the president has been denied his day in court. But every time a court offers him an opportunity to establish by proof what he is promoting by Twitter, Team Trump folds. Why is that?

Why, indeed.