It was 2:30 AM on November 4, 2020 when Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States took the podium in the East Room of the White House to triumphantly declare victory in his reelection bid against Democrat former Vice President Joe Biden after a long and grueling campaign marred by an ongoing pandemic and civil unrest. It took about 30 seconds into the speech for Trump to start bitching and complaining, variously going back-and-forth between confidently claiming he had won and complaining about a massive conspiracy against him underway at the time.
This outcome was still up in the air at this point as it took approximately 83 more hours from this moment for the major networks to call the electoral college for Joe Biden, but you can tell he already knew he was doomed – and this was when the long-prophesied MAGApocalypse began.
Often in 2021 and 2022 we would write some version of “not a single day has gone by since the 2020 election that we haven’t in some way covered something related to Trump and his minions’ inability to accept that they lost.” Thaaaat’s probably not true by now in 2023. Surely there’s been a day or two here or there when we didn’t pick up a story about the Capitol insurrection or the criminal cases or some stupid election conspiracy theory or whatever. It’s still been by far the dominant story here for the last three years and will continue to be so for at least another 366 days.