Our national nightmare: When will it end?

When will our long national nightmare ever end? Maybe on Jan. 20, and very badly, when President Trump does God knows what as he still refuses to concede that he lost the election.
This is all so sad and scary, not Trump’s behavior since it’s all been so predictable for a man who cares only about himself, but the fact that Senate President Mitch McConnell and many other prominent Republican officials are enabling Trump’s falsehoods and lies about voter fraud – the same thing Trump was saying months before the first votes were ever cast in the presidential election.
Can you imagine the outcry among those same Republicans if a sitting Democratic president were making the same false allegations and refused to concede defeat? He would have been burned in effigy – or worse.
But the GOP lawmakers, who have evidently determined that raw political expediency is worth far more to them than saving our democracy, refuse to act like true leaders and urge the president to do the right thing for once.
Trump’s repeated and belligerent denials of reality (as if Tweeting in all caps that he won makes it so) ---- and the GOP blindly going along with them --- make no sense on so many grounds, but worst of all, Trump’s autocratic denial of any transitional assistance to Biden is endangering the country’s national security and health as COVID-19 cases skyrocket across the nation. (The vaccines’ widespread distribution is still months away, so that won’t be an immediate panacea for the pandemic.)
Here are some of the many reasons why none of this makes sense and why we’re on a path for, at the very least, inflicting long-term damage on our democracy and, at the very most, encouraging the sitting president to take steps to overturn the election results or to --- God forbid --- pull a coup d’état by refusing to cede power Jan. 20.
Don’t scoff or call that fantasy: If Trump keeps insisting he won an election he lost and refuses to concede, the lack of transition cooperation will be the least of our worries as our democracy quickly dissolves into anarchy while the pandemic rages on unchecked.
Here are some facts to consider:
* Biden is on pace to win the same number of Electoral votes, 306, as Trump in 2016, a number that Trump called "a landslide." (Biden reached the 270 Electoral votes needed for victory on Saturday, Nov. 7.)
* Unlike Trump in 2016, Biden won the popular vote by several million votes.
* Homeland Security called the voting in 2020 the most secure of any recent election.
* The Department of Justice investigators sent to states by Attorney General William Barr to investigate the vote found no evidence of irregularities in the voting that would have changed the outcome.
* Local election officials of both parties have also said that the voting was conducted legally and without any instances of fraud.
* Christopher Krebs, the director of the federal agency --- the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – that had attested to the integrity of the 2020 election, was promptly fired this week by our petulant president because he dared to tell the truth.
* Trump's lies defy common sense for many reasons, but consider this query: How can the same votes cast in the election that properly decided local, Senate and Congressional races --- including many that the Republicans won as they cut the Democrats’ numbers in the House --- be valid for those races, and then fraudulent for the presidential one, or more specifically, just for those people who chose not to vote for President Trump?
The answer, of course, is that they can't --- unless you’re a dictator and only allow yourself to be on the ballot or consider all votes cast against you to be somehow illegitimate.
That reasoning makes absolutely no sense and defies logic.
* Trump won many of the same key states in 2016 by the same or even smaller margins than Biden won them by in 2020. Again, the votes were fine four years ago, but fraudulent four years later when they put Biden on top? Again, that makes no sense.
All of this is extremely frightening and goes well beyond politics or political differences. 
I have a lot of friends on both sides of the political spectrum and I am an independent or unenrolled voter, as non-affiliated voters are called in Massachusetts. And, as an unenrolled voter and as an American, I pray every day that the GOP will wake up and tell the bully in the White House to concede before his false assertions that he won the election lead to a violent civil war breaking out – or worse.
Don’t laugh: Enabling repeated lies about voting – the fundamental building block of our democracy -- will ultimately, if unchecked, lead to the destruction of that democracy.
That’s the road that the president and his GOP enablers are on right now unless they choose to reverse course