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Speaking of those advantages, do you hear any Democrats saying that the Senate was stolen, even though their minority has consistently represented many millions more Americans than the Republicans majority? Instead, after a disappointing election night, they regrouped and said, we have to get out the vote and win those two runoffs in Georgia. Thats what you do in a democracy.

Sure, Democrats are mad at Mr. Trump and opposed to his presidency not only because he lost the popular vote by so much, but because he was and remains so manifestly unfit to hold the office, as many top Republicans used to say themselves.

One of the countless measures of Mr. Trumps unfitness is his willingness to accept or even solicit foreign interference to win. That is why, if there was any cheating in the 2020 election, it was committed by the president himself, when he tried to extort a foreign nation to gin up dirt on Mr. Biden and his son Hunter. For this high crime he was impeached by the House of Representatives. To be clear, that impeachment was not the result of Democrats refusal to accept his legitimacy to govern; it was a result of his decision to squander that legitimacy yet again by behaving like a strongman.

But the bigger picture here is the decades-long descent of the Republican Party which now prefers conspiracy theories over facts, magical thinking over science and delegitimizing its political opponents over substantive and responsible governance. Just a few recent examples: The racist birther slurs that Mr. Trump spearheaded against Mr. Obama; the reflexive opposition to everything Mr. Obama tried to do, even before he took office; the blanket denial of his appointment of federal judges, culminating in the theft of a Supreme Court vacancy that arose nearly a year before he left office; and finally, the seating of Mr. Trumps Supreme Court nominee only days before an election that he lost fair and square.

Republicans have been working tirelessly to make voting harder for many years, and especially this year, for precisely this reason. They knew that Mr. Trump was unpopular and that Mr. Biden would probably win if more people voted. When voter suppression failed, they had only two options: accept their fate like serious and responsible people do, or claim that any loss they suffered was by definition the result of fraud.

Once again, they picked door number two. This is the problem with getting comfortable with the perks of minority rule, as Republicans have over the past several decades. Its not just that you can ignore what most Americans want. Its that you genuinely believe that theres no way your opponent can win much less by an absolute majority without cheating.

That attitude is fatal to a democracy, the survival of which depends, above all, on the loser accepting the results. The Democrats, along with most of the rest of the world, understand this. One party alone is responsible for dragging the nation to this perilous place.

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Trump, in Attacking the Election, Is Attacking Democracy - The New York Times