Josh Marshall, on Trump’s blizzard of lies and nonsense about election fraud:

Truly none of this is happening. It’s like being in one of those old iMax surround theaters watching a movie of a roller coaster or hang gliding or parachuting off the side of a mountain. You’re gripping your seat because you’re being inundated with sound and visual stimuli. It feels totally real. But yet … none of it’s real. You’re just sitting in a theater near some mall in the suburbs. None it is real.

I know you know that … sort of. But again, think how much in this climate of stress and confusion and specters of irresolvable disputes simply isn’t real. Just entirely made up.

That doesn’t mean everything is fine. This false drama and lying is all meant to set the stage for things that are very real. Certainly not to justify – but even for those of us who are gripping on to the sinews of our democracy with every strength, it creates a sense of forward motion, inevitability, disorder. But the reality check is still helpful, critical, necessary. Because none of it is really. It’s a storm of drama, completely fictive, to set the stage for an unpopular President to reject the results of an election that ends his presidency.