According to a new Rasmussen Poll, 61% of Republicans think it is “very likely” that Democrats stole the election.  

Really, why wouldn’t they? 

For four years, Democrats and their handmaidens in the liberal media have lied their heads off, spinning false narratives aimed at undermining President Trump. Why would Trump supporters trust them now? 

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The Russian collusion story, which the president rightfully deemed a “hoax,” was the granddaddy of misinformation campaigns. It led to the appointment of a special counsel and an exhausting investigation that ensnared and ruined the lives of entirely blameless people like retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and his son.  

As Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Ala., said, after the release of transcripts showed that Obama officials and Democrats knew they were peddling falsehoods, “It is now clear that Adam Schiff lied to his colleagues, that he lied to the media, and that he lied to the American public.” Congressman Schiff, D-Calif., wasn’t alone. 

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Democrats in the House impeached President Trump for pushing officials in Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden’s activities while he was our government’s point person in that nation. Little did we know how appropriate Trump’s request was. In recent weeks it has become clear that Joe’s son Hunter Biden did indeed participate in questionable activities in that corrupt country and that his father may have protected his interests.  

Democrats and their media partners denigrated the president from day one, telling tall tales of nefarious self-dealing and portraying the Trump White House as dangerously unstable.   

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In 2018 the New York Times published to great fanfare the op-ed by “Anonymous,” in which the author claimed he was one of “many” high-level employees in the Trump “administration [who] are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”    

The Times claimed its author was a “senior official,” and implied that President Trump posed such a threat to the country that it simply had to break its long-standing rule against running anonymous pieces. Turned out, the author was Miles Taylor, who at the time served as deputy chief of staff to the secretary of DHS – in effect, a nobody.   

Never once did the mainstream media applaud Trump’s many victories, like the return of hostages from abroad or trade concessions made by Beijing. His breakthrough diplomacy in the Middle East was greeted with a polite yawn.  

The left-wing media joined Democrats like Michelle Obama in lying about Trump’s immigration program, claiming it was his White House that initiated the policy of separating children from their parents at the border. Oh, the lamentations over “children in cages,” until it turned out the worrisome photos were from 2014 and that it actually was the Obama administration that began the maligned practice.  

So many lies, so much nastiness. 

But nothing – nothing – prepared Trump supporters for how powerfully the mainstream media, Twitter and Facebook were to jump on the scale to ensure Biden’s victory.   

These nitwits and others in the smug intelligentsia who so despise Trump and the people who voted for him do not understand that millions of Americans love their country, and want a president who shares that enthusiasm. 

No one could have imagined that a documented story about Hunter Biden’s shady dealings in Ukraine and China during the years that Joe Biden served as vice president would be banned – literally banned – on social media.   

It was impossible to foresee how all dissenting voices on COVID policy and practices, including from senior health experts, would be silenced in order to hurt Trump. 

Nobody expected that an unelected media magnate – Twitter’s Jack Dorsey – would control what President Trump could say to the public.   

Trump supporters, cheered that 56% of the nation claimed they were better off than four years before, could not and do not believe that he could fail to win reelection.   

Unlike the Left, those folks understand why he was elected in 2016. They know it was because people were fed up with the elitist globalism of Barack Obama and liked the unabashedly pro-US message from an outsider candidate. They were sickened by the treacly excesses of political correctness and hungry for a president determined to protect them from terrorists, tighten our borders and take on China.   

Liberals have a very different idea about why President Trump was elected in 2016. Writing in Foreign Policy recently, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argued that “Trump built his political brand … by encouraging many Republican voters to see themselves as belonging to a shrinking white majority that can only maintain control of the commanding heights by undemocratic means.”  

These nitwits and others in the smug intelligentsia who so despise Trump and the people who voted for him do not understand that millions of Americans love their country, and want a president who shares that enthusiasm.   

When Obama declared in 2008 that small-town Midwesterners “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them … as a way to explain their frustrations," it wasn’t a “slip”; that’s how he feels.  

Tens of millions of Americans have lost faith in our institutions, our media and now in our elections. After months of Democrats rewriting the voting rules, extending deadlines and pushing mail-in voting, only 44% of Republicans, a month before the election, thought the ballots would be “accurately cast and counted nationwide,” a record low.  

Those doubts are now fueling uncertainty about the election outcome – uncertainty encouraged by President Trump. Unhappily, there appear to be enough instances of vote irregularities to feed suspicions, but not enough to overturn the results. 

Trump supporters will want the president to be their voice going forward. Whether he chooses to run again in 2024, or whether he is content to be a senior party influencer, Trump is not going away. 

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But now, to maintain his powerful voice and leadership, he needs to concede. The Left is using his refusal to admit defeat as more proof that he is undermining our democracy. He cannot allow this to be his legacy; his presidency has been so much bigger than that. 

Trump should confound the Left, as he has done on so many occasions, by calling off the shaky legal battles and by stepping aside. If only for now. 

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