It seems that every week brings something new to divide us. The polarizing noise machine rarely rests and requires a constant diet of new fodder. 

In just the last month, we have been treated to the botched exit from Afghanistan and resulting human tragedy; new, persistent fights over mask requirements and vaccine mandates; Texas’s new abortion law; tighter voting procedures in the Lone Star state and elsewhere; inflation fears; the end of the eviction moratorium; and endless arguments about Democratic spending plans.   

Also, record heat and devastating fires and flooding that ever more bring home the reality of climate change; early skirmishing over the coming need to raise the federal debt ceiling; and the continuing war for the soul of the GOP with George W. Bush skillfully using a 9/11 remembrance to take Donald Trump to task for giving aid and comfort to extremist forces. 

That litany is representative of our usual political fare. Some of these battles stay with us from month to month; others yield and are replaced by the latest, freshest dust-up du jour. 

The whole lot is indicative of our diseased and dysfunctional politics. But it is all scattershot even while there is a single, lethal bullet aimed directly at the heart of our political system. 

That gunshot comes in the form of former Trump’s ceaseless, unrestrained, evidence-free effort to discredit the 2020 election and our electoral process more broadly. 

More than ten months after the election was conducted and decided, and a full nine months after the Electoral College made it official, Trump soldiers on multiple times a day in peddling the grotesque fiction that the election was somehow fraudulent. 

Here are but a few of his steady drumbeat of public statements from just the past few weeks. 

“’The Big Lie’ is the ial Election of 2020.” 

“If the Democrats could fight wars as well as they execute Election Fraud, we would have obliterated all of our many enemies throughout the World, and would have nothing to worry about!” 

“FIX 2020 FIRST!” 

“The voters are demanding it (‘a full Forensic Audit in Michigan’) because they have no confidence in their elections after the Rigged 2020 ial Election Scam.” 

If space allowed, 400 examples could be provided instead of just these four. While psychologists and grammatists alike can analyze his fondness for capital letters. 

We have properly relegated Holocaust deniers and 9/11 deniers to the recesses of society. Not content to deny his predecessor’s citizenship, Trump has now become the country’s most notorious election denier. He deserves every bit of reproach and dishonor attendant to those who refuse to accept other obvious truths. 

Sadly, troublingly, predictably, the man still has far too many followers who have embraced his fantasy, borne of a pathological inability to ever own defeat, that he is still the rightful president and that the 2020 election was “stolen” away. 

Per recent surveys, nearly two-thirds of Republicans have succumbed to this Trump-fueled myth. Even about one out of four unaffiliated voters buy into it. Overall, just shy of 30 percent of Americans view Joe Biden as an illegitimate president. 

This is not business as usual or just the latest iteration of partisanship. It is something infinitely more dangerous and debilitating. Elections should be hard fought. Close elections can be recounted. Disparities or improprieties can be litigated. 

However, ultimately, there has to be a winner whom the nation recognizes and accepts. Way back in 1960, Richard Nixon, hardly a pillar of grace or rectitude, took the high road in conceding the race to John F. Kennedy even when Nixon had vastly more reason to doubt the integrity of the results (think Cook County, Illinois) than does Trump. 

It is one thing for a wealthy pillow salesman to peddle such unsubstantiated nonsense. Or even for a lowly, intelligence-challenged County Clerk in Mesa County, Colorado to do so. It is quite another for a defeated , now ex-president no matter how painful that is for him to accept, to use every resource at his disposal to cast a shadow on the electoral process. 

Be clear here: If Donald Trump really cared about “Making America Great Again”, he would not be concertedly undermining our sacred tradition. This is not about MAGA, but about FADE (“Feed A Damaged Ego.”) 

If there was something – anything – to Trump’s assertions, would there not be a single judge, somewhere, anywhere, to validate a single charge? Especially given the number of federal judges appointed by Trump. 

The truth is that this past election was not all that close. Biden prevailed by over seven million votes and an electoral count virtually identical to that which had sent Trump to the Oval Office four years prior. 

Even in those narrowly contested states (Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, etc.), zero substantive evidence of impropriety was presented that any judge deemed sufficient to pursue. Nada. 

Trump’s is nothing less than an all-out assault on the core, foundational underpinning of our democracy, that being trust in our elections. Of course, it was this invention, repeated and amplified endlessly, that spurred the January 6th assault on the Capitol.  

But even if no one among his legions had ever picked up a crowbar or baseball bat or cannister of bear spray, Trump’s refusal to honor the core tenets of our Constitution was insurrectionist in spirit and fact. 

Trump’s critics wave an immense list of his outrages and contemptible conduct. His fans find many of those particulars mold-breaking and endearing.  

But it all pales to relative insignificance next to what he has done since the election, after months of previews, to undermine the essential, paramount feature of our democracy. For shame. 

While we are at it, for shame also to all those who give voice to this poisonous mendacity while knowing better. Especially to those eight senators and 139 congresspeople, Republicans all, who voted to overturn the election results based on nothing but thin air and one person’s perverted psyche. 

Our country has already sunk low in the loss of good faith and goodwill across party lines. If we now lose that baseline acceptance of the validity of elections, what exactly is the bond that remains? 

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for ColoradoPolitics and the Denver Gazette. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann