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Minnesota Senator Tina Smith tweeted last week: “Look, I too once tried to save face by pretending to win something I had lost. Then I turned six.”

That is still a perfect description of Donald Trump’s reaction to losing his bid for re-election, even if he has now agreed to let the transition proceed.

Let that sink in for a minute. For the past two weeks the President of the United States has been throwing a temper tantrum for the whole world to see because he believes Joe Biden cheated him out of a win. 

He still believes it, and right on cue, most of the 72 million Republicans who voted for him do, too. “No way in hell Trump lost the election” is how they put it.

These are the same people whose reasons for voting for Trump the rest of us are supposed to try to understand by listening to their grievances about how ignored and forgotten they feel. 

Really? Why would anyone with any sense listen to people who act like they don’t have any?

These are the same people who believe having to wear a mask in public places is a violation of their individual rights.

These are the same people who believe Trump is telling the truth when he says the pandemic is a Democratic hoax and the 258,000 Americans the virus has killed actually died from other causes. 

I need someone to explain to me again why I would take people like this seriously when it is not even possible to have a rational conversation with them. 

Of course, the worst among them are Republican members of the Senate and House who in a few instances openly support Trump’s authoritarian leadership or in most cases are too afraid to say they don’t. I can’t figure out which is worse.

What I have figured out, though, along with many others, is that most Republicans support Trump trying to raise doubts about the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election because it serves their anti-government interests. 

Making any success a Biden/Harris administration might have harder means the whole government will have a harder time working well, and that is precisely what Republicans want.   

One exception is Republican Senator Mitt Romney who described Trump’s pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election this way: “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American president.”

Let that also sink in for a minute. The threat to our nation is not coming from a foreign power, but from the Oval Office itself, yet, only one Republican in the entire Senate and House has anything to say about it. 

Sad as it is, Republicans today have done what no Republican would have done in times past. They have permitted an unprecedented challenge to the integrity of our election process, the cornerstone of our democracy, to stand without an ounce of resistance.

No matter that Trump’s 40 lawsuits to date have either been thrown out or withdrawn for lack of evidence, or that conservative federal judge Matthew Brann in Pennsylvania said that what Trump was asking the court to do was the equivalent of ignoring the Constitution and the will of the people.  

Elections are the foundation of any democracy, ours included, the thing that makes democracy what it is, and only one Republican United States Senator has the courage to call out Trump for his attack on them.  

When the people of a nation lose confidence in the integrity of their elections, their democracy is in trouble, and because of Trump and his Republican enablers, America is well on the way to that tipping point.  

On the one hand it makes no sense, and yet on the other it does. What I suggest happened is that Trump’s need for power and Republican lust for power created a perfect storm that is now threatening our democracy.   

It is true, as Noble Laureate Paul Krugman has written, that the storm was brewing before Trump came into office: “Republicans have been systematically undermining democracy for years through voter suppression, gerrymandering that gives them control of state legislatures even when they lose the popular vote by large margins, stripping power from governors who happen to be Democrats, and trying to bring criminal charges against their opponents.”

At the same time, Trump’s lack of decency and integrity and his authoritarian modus operandi seeded that storm and turned it into an unfolding catastrophe. 

This is the state of American politics today, but the election gave a majority of Americans a chance to say it is not the America we want.   

For the first time in four years we can celebrate Thanksgiving Day believing that better days are ahead, even if how we celebrate is controlled by the harsh realities of a pandemic. 

Republicans and Trumpism will, of course, be with us in the new year, so to make the days ahead better will likely be a struggle against both.

That said, Joe Biden continues to believe he can help bring our nation together to face the serious problems that demand our attention.

Republicans, of course, will have a lot to say about that. Is there any real hope they will be willing to work with him?

I would say that the chance does exist because Republicans have birthdays, too, and perhaps some of them will soon turn six.