https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/magazine\/2020\/11\/13\/trumps-crazy-and-confoundingly-successful-conspiracy-theory-436404<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Trump is not making a narrow, surgical, legally feasible case to enhance his chances to still be living in the White House come January 21. (That\u2019s \u2026 improbable.) He\u2019s not doing this, either, to win the argument. (It\u2019s almost mathematically impossible.) He\u2019s doing it, say political strategists, longtime Trump watchers and experts on authoritarian tactics, to sow doubt, save face and strengthen even in defeat his lifeblood of a bond with his political base.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s \u2026 working. Seven in 10 Republicans, according to a POLITICO\/Morning Consult poll earlier this week, believe the election was stolen from their candidate.<\/p>\n
It is overall for Trump both a culmination and a continuation: a grand finale of sorts of the past five-plus years, in which he\u2019s relied so much on so much unreality\u2014and also a runway, a kind of topspin toward what\u2019s to come once he leaves Washington, D.C., and presumably decamps to Mar-a-Lago to initiate a post-presidency that is all but assured to be unlike any other. The stakes are sky-high, and the collateral damage to America\u2019s democracy could be lasting and profound, but Trump is doing what Trump has always done. He\u2019s spinning a myth to serve his own interest. He\u2019s doing what he believes he needs to do to put at least himself in the best possible position for the future after yet another failure.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[821,221,372,318,132,1029,323,170],"class_list":["post-3861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-conspiracy-theory","tag-donald-trump","tag-election","tag-false-beliefs","tag-lies","tag-misinformation","tag-misleading","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3861"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3862,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3861\/revisions\/3862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}