He told us he was going to do it. Everyone was prepared for him to do it. And yet, even with that foreshadowing, it was still chilling to watch (along with the rest of the free world) an American president baselessly calling an election into question during a lie-filled rant as power was being ripped from his small, weak hands. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” That was one of a long litany of potentially violence-triggering lies as Trump began the scorched earth episode of history’s worst reality show. WaPo: Trump’s White House statement: Falsehood upon falsehood. Trump’s rant was so bad and so false and so dangerous that as he began floating baseless claims of election fraud, television networks cut away. (I just wish Nixon were alive to see how not bad he was.)

+ NYT: “Even for President Trump, it was an imagined version of reality, one in which he was not losing but the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy stretching across the country in multiple cities, counties and states, involving untold numbers of people all somehow collaborating to steal the election in ways he could not actually explain. Never mind that Mr. Trump presented not a shred of evidence during his first public appearance since late on election night or that few senior Republican officeholders endorsed his false claims of far-reaching fraud. A presidency born in a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace appeared on the edge of ending in a lie about his own faltering bid for re-election.” (And after those two lies, and the tens of thousands in between, 69 million Americans still saw fit to vote for Trump.)

+ “What matters, of course, is not what Trump says, or how he says it, but what he does—and what his supporters do at his behest.” Trump Moves Into the Burn-It-Down Phase.

+ “In the 48 hours since polls closed on Election Day, President Donald Trump’s campaign has made good on a pledge to flood the courts with challenges, but so far it has either lost cases outright or gotten orders with little to no effect on vote tallies.”

+ AP: GOP divided over Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. There’s no fraud. The election will be called. The electoral advantage will be decisive. And don’t call it a comeback. No one was ahead. No one was making up or losing ground. That’s just bullshit for television. A vote is a vote. The order in which you count them is meaningless. None of that will make the next few weeks any smoother. Life is too short. Except the hours between now and January 20

+ Meanwhile, back in reality, Pennsylvania will soon be called for Biden, as will the election. Or as I like to put it: Scranton Comes Alive. Biden’s Secret Service nickname should be Thank God. I just hope the election ends soon, for the sanity of Steve Kornacki and John King, and for my own. Last night I said, Hey Siri, and she was like, “Dude, I don’t know either.” We need this to finally end.

+ And with that, here’s the latest, and hopefully the lastest, from WaPo, NYT, and CNN.