Watching Trump claim a vast electoral conspiracy is sickening for America’s friends across the globe

The president is either too stupid to understand the electoral process, or he’s lying

Nothing became Donald Trump’s presidency as much as his final hours. 

I cannot sum up Trump’s latest rambling, wheezy, offensive, befuddled, insulting, desperate diatribe better than the CNN journalist Anderson Cooper, who called him “an obese turtle on his back flailing in the sun”. He was too kind, because you’d want to turn the turtle right way up. 

Trump deserves no such sympathy for his self-pity. When he attacks Detroit we know he’s playing the race card - a sure sign he’s desperate. When he talks about being shocked about how the late counted mail-in votes breaking heavily for Biden, Trump is either too stupid to understand the electoral process, or he is lying.

Maybe there’s some strange Trumpian cocktail of stupidity, native cunning and “positive thinking” that creates an hallucinatory world where half the election officials in miscellaneous far flung states are engaged in a vast conspiracy against him. And that that organised mass fraud perpetrated by thousands of hard-pressed honest officials and volunteers, sat there straightening out bits of paper with baying armed thugs outside, has been coordinated by that criminal mastermind Joe Biden. Has Trump finally lost his mind?  

It turns the stomach for America’s friends world-wide to watch this deadbeat gangster claim in a caricature of statesmanship that he is trying to save democracy by trying to stop counting ballots, but only where they are trending against him - when we can all see he is only trying one last effort to save his sorry orange ass. 

Like all overgrown bullies, he’s basically a child who thinks everyone will eventually let him have his own way provided he throws a big enough tantrum and jams up the election and the courts. But this time his “case” is just so absurdly weak and the stakes too high that he won’t be able to. America is not yet Belarus. He’s been defeated by mail-in ballots - no conspiracy, just votes.  

The sooner Trump gets out of the White House the sooner the Democrats and the Republicans can get to work trying to erase the indelible tangerine stain he’s left on public life. 

If he won’t listen to the American people, then his family (the saner ones), his Vice President, his cabinet, his party and the courts will have to take action. If he still won’t accept that he’s lost an election then we’ve reached the point where he is plainly too deranged to continue in Office and the 25th Amendment, dealing with a mentally incapacitated president, should be triggered. The video of his latest speech provides all the evidence needed. Maybe only then will this nightmare be over.