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Yes, Donald Trump got the results of an election and accepted them without a murmur. Indeed, he boasted about them. His supporters thronged X to tell the person with fewer votes that she had lost. As though winning fewer votes in an election were anything but an incentive to keep calling that election into question for years to come and making life hell for the election workers. As though you could tell whom people really wanted based on whom they cast their votes for. As though votes meant anything!

Supporters tried to puzzle out what had changed. What made this election different from the presidential election? Was it that it was in New Hampshire? No, that can’t be. New Hampshire went for Joe Biden in 2020. Trump won, yes, but that couldn’t be it, could it? It couldn’t be that he just was saying all those things before because he didn’t win, could it?

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“Maybe this is going to start a wonderful trend of Donald Trump accepting election results,” one nonpartisan expert suggested timidly. “You start small, accepting a caucus result — barely enough votes to fill a stadium — and then you accept a New Hampshire primary, and, bang, before you know it, you’re accepting the results of all kinds of elections. The real trick, as I see it, will be getting him to accept the results of an election that he doesn’t win, so we can let the election workers come out of hiding and go about their lives normally........

© Washington Post