President Trump's scramble to postpone the inevitable by desecrating democracy failed for good Monday afternoon.
The General Services Administration formally ascertained that President-elect Joe Biden is the "apparent winner" of the Nov. 3 election, allowing the government's essential role in the peaceful transfer of power to begin after a delay of nearly three weeks. The agency's head, Trump appointee Emily Murphy, told Biden of the decision right after Trump's effort to subvert the vote failed in Michigan.
The state's normally obscure Board of State Canvassers voted 3-0, with one of the two Republicans abstaining, to formalize election results showing Biden carried the state by 154,000 votes. The action was a devastating setback for Trump's already almost-impossible effort to reverse his re-election loss. It left unblemished, as a tangibly comprehensive failure, the the president's campaign to poison the nation's confidence in the election.
More than 30 lawsuits, in six of the states he lost, have not produced a single piece of evidence of election fraud that a judge has been willing to accept — most recently Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani's baseless effort to get the results in Pennsylvania tossed out, which a federal judge dismissed in scathing terms Saturday night.
"This cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state," Judge Matthew Brann, a Republican, wrote. "Our people, laws, and institutions demand more."
If anything, the litigation ironically ends up supporting the exact opposite argument Trump is making: The election was not marred by any serious irregularities.
To be sure, the president's steady stream of Twitter disinformation has persuaded a significant share of the electorate — almost all of them his Republican base — that widespread fraud has made the results not credible. And the GOP leadership in Congress and most state governments has enabled though its collective silence this unprecedented presidential campaign to sully the foundation of the American republic
The margin of Biden's victory is 2.8 percentage points in Michigan. But The Republican National Committee and the state GOP wanted the canvassing board to postpone a lockdown of the result for two weeks to allow for an inquiry into alleged problems in Detroit. (The state Democratic Party concedes there are irregularities in a few precincts, but they involve no more than 450 votes.)
The consensus view of the state's election law was that, since Wayne County (which includes Detroit) and all the other 82 counties have certified their results, the state board had no discretion but to sign off on the totals. If the board had declined to do that right away, the Michigan Supreme Court would presumably have ordered it to do so as soon as it was asked to intervene.
Any suspense was ended when one GOP member, Aaron Van Langevelde, opened the meeting by saying "we've got a duty to do this" and certify the count — but only after hundreds of public comments were heard first.
Any other decision would have marked one of the president's few victories in the three weeks since Election Day — and fomented new talk about a constitutional crisis. But it's still highly likely such an impasse would have been short-lived. A standoff, had it lasted long enough, would theoretically have put the fate of the state's 16 electoral votes in the hands of the GOP-controlled Legislature. Its two top leaders were summoned to the White House on Friday, and later spent the night at the Trump International Hotel, but after meeting the president they said they know of now reason why the outcome in their stature should not be Biden winning.
Even under the extraordinarily unlikely scenario in which Michigan's electoral votes were put in limbo or even handed to Trump, Biden would still have 290, or 20 more than he needs.
And any Trump effort to throw into chaos more states that Biden won narrowly would have few options. Democratic Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar is set to certify the results as soon as Monday afternoon in Pennsylvania: Biden secured its 20 electoral votes by a margin of 81,000 popular votes. Nevada plans to do so Tuesday: Biden won its 6 electoral votes by more than 33,000. Arizona and Wisconsin are on course to certify their results next week.
By law, presidential results certified by Dec. 8 are immune from additional challenges — and many senior Republicans have signaled they are willing to wait until then before declaring the election is over and Biden won.
GOP Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania did so Saturday night, after Trump's lawsuit was dismissed. "To ensure that he is remembered for these outstanding accomplishments, and to help unify our country, President Trump should accept the outcome of the election and facilitate the presidential transition process," he said.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.