All six states where President Trump contested his defeat have finalized results showing he lost, fair and square. Forty lawsuits have gone nowhere for lack of evidence anyone cheated. The administration's top election security official was willing to sacrifice his job for concluding this "election was the most secure in American history."
And now the Cabinet member most influentially loyal to the president the past two years, William Barr, has reported that his Justice Department has not uncovered any evidence of the widespread voter fraud Trump alleges — and has seen nothing that might alter the outcome of an election clearly won by Joe Biden.
Under any normal American democratic circumstances, such a clear conclusion from the attorney general delivered four weeks after Election Day would be the belt encircling the suspenders holding up the elastic waistband pants. Instead, the ousted president declared Wednesday: "We will win!"
Trump's dogged pursuit of his fantastical theories could be ignored altogether from now on. Or else they might get noted only as sideshow evidence of a sore loser who's so intent on attacking every available presidential norm that he's considering announcing a 2024 comeback bid on Biden's inauguration day.
But Trump will remain the most powerful person on the planet for seven more weeks, with the overwhelming majority of fellow Republicans holding power continuing to acquiesce to his out-of-bounds behavior. First among them is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has refused to acknowledge Biden's victory while referring obliquely to legislative negotiations next year with a new administration.
"More and more on my side are at least approaching a public acknowledgement of the reality of the situation," Trey Grayson, a former GOP secretary of state of Kentucky and a co-chairman of the advisory board for the Secure Elections Project, said Wednesday. "But some real damage has been done."
Grayson pointed in part to the threats of violence against officials who have overseen the vote in states Trump lost, which neither the president nor most top Republicans have been willing to condemn. One of those officials, Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and Georgia's voting system implementation manager, excoriated the president and other members of his party on Tuesday for their silence.
"It has to stop," said Sterling, who has worked on two recounts affirming Biden's win in the state. "This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy, and all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. It's too much."
The president did not reply. Instead, after using Twitter to predict his victory one more time Wednesday, Trump tweeted out messages advancing a discredited set of reports about voting irregularities and mistreated GOP poll watchers in Michigan.
The issues they have pointed to are typical in every election: problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots miscast or lost.
By midafternoon he was also remaining silent about what Barr told the Associated Press on Tuesday: that while federal prosecutors and FBI agents have been working to follow up on a range of specific complaints and information they've received about voting malfeasance, "to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election."
That comment, which did draw a rebuke from Trump's attorneys, is especially notable given how Barr has been among the president's most ardent and important allies — including by repeatedly making unsubstantiated warnings about the vulnerability of mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic.
While Trump has permitted the transition to a Biden administration to begin, he has deviated from all other modern presidents by refusing to concede.
His next formal opportunity to do so comes in a dozen days, when members of the Electoral College across the country convene to cast their ballots. The people have given Biden a solid claim on 306 of those votes, to 232 for Trump.
It's up to Congress to tabulate the results and announce the winner. Such a joint session, set for Jan. 6, is normally a news-free ceremonial affair. But federal law provides the president's GOP allies at the Capitol an opening to seek to disrupt if not derail Biden's final step toward the presidency — by challenging the validity of some electoral votes and making their House and Senate colleagues vote on the matter.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.