PHILADELPHIA – The end came in all the places you'd expect, in all the ways you'd expect, with all the people you'd expect.
When news broke Saturday that Donald Trump's reign was ending, the president was on a golf course that he owns in Virginia, playing his last round as a non-loser. In Washington, about 125 of his worshipful supporters gathered on the stoop of the Supreme Court to "stop the steal," then circumnavigated the U.S. Capitol seven times, because that's how the Israelites conquered Jericho, according to the Book of Joshua. And a pair of Trump's most loyal surrogates made a defiant stand on the gravelly backside of a landscaping business in an industrial stretch of Northeast Philadelphia, near a crematorium and an adult-video store called Fantasy Island, along State Road, which leads — as being associated with Trump sometimes does — to a prison.
Rudolph Giuliani, America's mayor turned Trump's sloppy fixer, squinted into the autumnal sun at journalists who had assembled outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping — a choice of location that multiple Trump staffers could not account for, saying that it was the work of the campaign's Pennsylvania advance team. Literally anywhere else would have conveyed more legitimacy on the enterprise, but legitimacy did not seem a high priority for one of the last battles of a lost war.
"Joe Frazier is still voting here — kind of hard, since he died five years ago," Giuliani said in a meandering monologue, referring to the champion boxer who died in 2011 as an example of Philadelphia's unproven election malfeasance. "But Joe continues to vote. If I recall correctly, Joe was a Republican. So maybe I shouldn't complain. But we should go see if Joe is voting Republican or Democrat now, from the grave. Also Will Smith's father has voted here twice since he died. I don't know how he votes, because his vote is secret. In Philadelphia, they keep the votes of dead people secret."
Where to begin?
Or rather: Where to end?
As Joe Biden marched slowly to victory last week, the Trump Train jackknifed. It raged about suspicious Sharpies in Arizona, about "irregularities" and "anomalies" in Georgia, about weaponized pizza boxes used to obscure democracy in Michigan, about "mathematical impossibilities" in Wisconsin, about ghosts in Philadelphia. What became clear is that Trump supporters thought Democratic votes, Democratic strongholds and Democratic methods were suspicious. Cities were suspicious. The turnout was suspicious. The mail was suspicious.
In reality, a preponderance of mailed-in ballots — which were counted last, in many places — had slowed the process and delayed the inevitability of Biden's win. Poll workers were just trying to do their civic duty — extracting, flattening, scanning and counting ballots into the night — but this was not good enough for the president's supporters. They showed up with instructions tailored to whatever way the tide was shifting.
