Can anyone still say with a straight face that Donald Trump wasn’t trying to illegally overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election? Everything he did from Nov. 3, 2020 to Jan. 20, 2021 appeared singularly focused on shoving his epic loser stink back in the bottle—and his loserly obsession kept him from such picayune obligations as putting together a workable vaccine distribution plan and aiding the incoming administration’s transition efforts.  

That’s because Donald Trump never cared about America. He only cared about doing everything in his power to hang onto the job he clearly had no interest in doing. And every day we see more alarming evidence that Trump was trying to maneuver his way back into the Oval Office by any means necessary.

As The New York Times reported on Wednesday—and the redoubtable Mark Sumner detailed here—the fake slates of electors confected by the Trumpian coup plotters represented no mere lark or flight of fancy. They were integral to an effort to gaslight America—and presumably the world—into thinking the election results were somehow indeterminate.

And because I’m preternaturally lazy, I’ll let Mr. Sumner summarize the plot:

Each day seems to make it clearer that the coup plot wasn’t some passing fancy that never made it outside the White House. It was an extensive operation, planned and executed over a period of months, that involved Republicans at every possible level—along with Trump’s entire legal, campaign, and White House teams.

And here’s how the Times reported on the memos:

The memos were initially meant to address Mr. Trump’s challenge to the outcome in Wisconsin, but they ultimately became part of a broader conversation by members of Mr. Trump’s legal team as the president looked toward Jan. 6 and began to exert pressure on Mr. Pence to hold up certification of the Electoral College count.

Of course, if you want to play devil’s advocate—or, more accurately, Satan’s asshole’s advocate—you could say, “Well, Trump was just doing everything in his power to set right the result of an election he knew in his heart he’d won—because he’s such a dogged defender of democracy and the rule of law, which he recently read all about under the ‘help Dottie find her kitten’ maze on his Denny’s kids’ placemat.” 

Bzzzt, wrong.

Indeed, in response to the Times‘ new report, elections expert David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a CBS News contributor, noted that Trump surely knew he was lying when his flying monkeys were flitting about the continent ripping the stuffing out of our republic. 

For the nontweeters:

“And it was 2 weeks before WI’s deadline to certify the election. In essence, what this reporting demonstrates is that Trump was trying to overturn results that weren’t even certified yet, and which he didn’t think were worthy of statewide recount.”

Now, I should note that technically, this doesn’t prove that Trump was knowingly lying about “winning” Wisconsin. I can demonstrate this with a simple thought experiment.

You see, any Trump assertion remains in a state of superposition in which—in Trump’s mind, at least—it is both true and untrue. So he is simultaneously both full of shit and not full of shit until an observer notes the lie and collapses the wave function, at which point—according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum dipshittery—Trump’s shitfulness, or lack thereof, can be precisely determined. But as he remains in this state of superposition—i.e., before his lies are observed—he is both up to his goofy eyeballs in horrifically overprocessed McNugget slag and not packed stem to stern in gross Mickey D’s detritus.

And this, as you already surely know, is the classic paradox known as Schrödinger’s scat.

Seriously, though, I don’t think Trump can actually tell the difference between reality and fantasy anymore, and more importantly, it’s clear he doesn’t care. The truth is basically irrelevant to him—he just picks whatever version of reality makes him look the least like a seditious blobfish.

And, needless to say, his version of reality is shared by no serious person on the planet. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.