There's a Bomb in the Lasagna
Way back when cartoons were awesome, Nickelodeon had Doug, a series about an imaginative kid whose adventures were largely in his head but still were very relatable, especially to those of us growing up in the 1990s.
There is one episode that has always stuck out in my mind, though. Doug’s sister, Judy, has a guy she likes over for dinner, but she thinks her family is too boring for someone hip and cool like him, so she makes them assume roles that made them seem way more hip than they were.
Except for Doug. He got to be the butler.
In his mind, though, he started acting more like a secret agent, and at one point, he plants a note in the guy’s cup that says “There’s a bomb in the lasagna.” When the guy reads it out loud, Doug screams “There’s a bomb in the lasagna?!” and takes a header into the dish, getting cheese and sauce and noodles everywhere. The whole scene is absurd, but that one moment captures just how insane it is to pretend that things are different than how they are, and how trying to make it so can spiral out of control.
That is what we’re currently seeing from President Donald Trump and his allies. It started out as just making up a scene that was more preferable than the reality. The boring answer to election day is that Trump lost because he was a weak candidate. But, rather than accept that things are the way they are, they wanted to concoct an elaborate alternate reality where things are much more exciting.
The election was stolen! Democrats cheated! You know, all of that stuff.
And where there are a good many people out there like Doug’s sister Judy, who are just trying to make a more pleasant reality, Trump and some of his loudest supporters are more like Doug, taking that reality and spinning it out of control with new wrinkles in the scenario that make it more and more fantastic and less and less honest.
In recent days, Trump has implied the FBI might be involved in election stealing. His allies are going out of their way to imply multiple Republicans who won did so by buying their seat from shadowy overlords who control the voting machines. They have decided Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia is in cahoots with Stacey Abrams. They will all claim that Trump actually won several of the states he lost by hundreds of thousands of votes.
It takes a certain detachment from reality - like the kind a fourth grader in a small town might have when he gets lost in his thoughts - to think that there are this many ways the election could have been stolen when the much simpler answer is that his campaign was awful and people were tired of the drama he always involved himself in.
And with all the baggage Trump brought to the table, it’s also very clear that Republicans made significant gains across the country, thwarting what could easily have been a Republican massacre.
You can either think the election was stolen, and join in that detachment from reality, or you can accept that mistakes were made and move on with the hopes that the Senate races in Georgia stay in Republican hands. Like I said yesterday, that presents us with the to best scenarios for government under President Joe Biden: Stalemate or compromise.
But these delusions of a stolen election have to stop.