The president-elect declares our votes illegal.

  Man this trump guy has really jumped the shark. Now he is claiming that some two million people voted illegally because they didn't vote for him. The man is really delusional, but in a dangerous kind of way. There is nothing worse than delusion mixed with power.

Let's be honest, this recount effort will not change the final outcome of the 2016 elections, but it would be interesting to see if there was any shady stuff going on. (I personally believe that this Russian hacking story is far more serious.)  Hey, we are talking about republicans here, they have done everything in their powers to win elections by any means necessary.

Still, you have to wonder why trump and his minions are so upset about this talk of a recount in a couple of states. Why not just let the process play itself out? Isn't this what we do in a democracy?

Of course that's wishful thinking on my part. Donald trump doesn't necessarily believe in our democracy as we know it.  To him, it's all about Donald, and this whole recount thing is raining on his parade.

"In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."

Someone needs to just lock him in a room for the next four years.

Finally, check out this essay from Matt Bai;

"I’ve written a lot of pretty rough things about Donald Trump over the last 18 months. I’ve called him an entertainer and an emotional extremist, a guy with a black hole at his center. I’ve likened him to P.T. Barnum and a dime-store psychic.

Not once, though, have I suggested that Trump is, personally, a racist or an anti-Semite, which are labels people throw around too often these days. He’s always struck me as an opportunist more than anything else — an act in search of an audience, which he just happened to find in some of the darkest corners of the American psyche.

I figured that if a loud chunk of conservative voters had been anxiously agitating for someone to champion, say, antipoverty programs instead of a wall, Trump would have jumped on that horse just as quickly. Whatever his flaws, I didn’t take him for a devoted bigot.

It’s only now, after another staggering week in our fast unraveling society, that I find myself asking a question I really never imagined asking.

Does the president-elect of the United States feel some genuine kinship with the white nationalists he’s managed to embolden? Or does he just think it’s not a big deal if a bunch of crazy guys go around saluting him like Nazis?

To be clear, I’ve never managed to get very excited about the white power folks who pop up in the news sporadically, marching in parades or holding little conferences in some backwoods Best Western. They’ve always seemed more sad than menacing to me, like the clowns at some crumbling, last-ditch carnival.

But if you haven’t yet watched this video of white nationalists “heiling” Trump in Washington last weekend, you should, because it’s really something.

Here’s a recognized leader of the so-called from which Trump has drawn support and counsel, a guy who wouldn’t look at all out of place as a swastika-clad extra in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” doing a little Hitler impression in Trump’s honor and railing against the media in the original German. (“One wonders if these people are people at all,” he says, which sounds to me like an invitation to violence.)

And this isn’t in some drab Southern banquet room, but rather in the Ronald Reagan Federal Building, a few blocks from the White House. (You’d think these people would at least have had the decency to walk across the plaza to the building named for Woodrow Wilson, who would have agreed with them when it came to mixing races.)

To keep this in perspective, which is important, we’re talking here about maybe 200 white guys in a country of 300 million-plus; it’s not like they’re goose-stepping through the streets by the hundreds of thousands. It’s also not like Trump endorsed the rally or sent a video expressing his gratitude.

But it’s not as if Trump has nothing to do with the brazenness of it, either. Even Republicans have to acknowledge that in his rhetoric and rallies throughout the campaign, Trump relegitimized a kind of racism and xenophobia that had been finally relegated to the margins of public life. He behaved like a human Ouija board, unleashing spirits better consigned to the netherworld.

This is distinct from your run-of-the-mill resentment in white, working-class enclaves, your basic backlash to political correctness gone badly awry, for which I actually have some sympathy. This is taunting Jewish journalists about going to the ovens. This is swastikas popping up again in our cities and suburbs.

This is ordinary citizens walking down the street and being told to go back to their own countries because they aren’t white. This is grown men who run around bullying every guy who doesn’t accept the superiority of white males by calling him a “cuck,” whatever that means.

This is new, or at least resurgent, and it is profoundly frightening to an awful lot of Americans at the moment.

So what is Trump’s response, now that he’s taken on the task of making America great again?

Well, he certainly had no problem summoning outrage this week. On Twitter, he railed against the impertinent cast of “Hamilton,” which he called an overrated show, and against “Saturday Night Live,” which he thought one-sided and not funny. He found time to bitterly complain to the president of NBC News about a photo that made him appear to have a double chin. (Reality is rough, even for a reality TV star.)

But when it came to leading white supremacists raising stiff arms to him as if he were Hitler reincarnate, Trump at first said nothing, and then, under pressure, allowed his spokeswoman to release a terse statement tepidly disavowing their support." [More here]

He disavows. *wink wink*