No, they're not as dumb as I thought. They're much, much worse.

I know now that it's sorta, kinda sinking in that this halfhearted attempt at ending democracy via a hilariously slapdash legal coup d'etat has failed miserably, there's a concerted effort to rehabilitate Trump's image into something approximating a human being.

And a big part of this rehabilitation effort, I've found, is Trump voters expecting everyone else to just play dumb and pretend all the lies, the corruption, the cruelty, and senseless deaths, the damage to our nation and its institutions, and all the other generally reprehensible things they proudly supported the past four years, including this shameless attempt to overturn an election you decisively lost by demanding judges hand you seven million votes without any legal justification, never happened.

No, they fucking happened.

Let me make something clear upfront: The word "dumb" means different things to different groups. Whenever I hear Trump voters use it, without exception it functions as a generic, go-to insult, on par with "fuckface" or "dickweed." It's a trigger word used as a reflex, aimed at everyone that doesn't mindlessly buy into their media propaganda.

But to everyone else, it has a far more complex, specific meaning, based on actual objective criteria. It involves critical thinking and basic inductive reasoning. It involves context. And the sheer extent to which these basic critical thinking skills are clearly absent based on your choice of argument alone is mind-boggling. It's beyond parody.

One of the most important things I've learned from Trumpism is that it's often more productive to examine the unspoken, underlying premises a person's argument is based on than the argument itself.

So let's do just that. Here is a list of extremely obvious pieces of information you're expecting me to ignore. It is by no means exhaustive. This is just off the top of my head.

1) That Donald Trump is a prolific liar with a long history of casually inventing vague conspiracies to avoid taking responsibility for his personal failures.

2) That Trump's entire identity revolves around the perception of being The Greatest Winner In Human History and he clearly lacks the strength of character to handle losing a nationwide popularity contest gracefully.

3) That Trump didn't just have over FIFTY frivolous cases instantly dismissed due to a total lack of evidence, and that not a single Supreme Court Justice, even those he installed, was willing to take his case.

4) That Trump's claims of voter fraud began AFTER the early "red mirage" caused by in-person ballots dissipated as mail-in ballots began to show Biden coming ahead.

(And I mean right after; there's absolutely no way he could abruptly know about all this widespread fraud that just blinked into existence once he realized he was losing.)

5) That, despite having innumerable innate advantages and being the clear favorite to win the election, Biden is the person who should be under suspicion for voter fraud and not, you know, the extremely corrupt and amoral politician that's way behind in the polls openly and repeatedly tried to meddle in the election.

(Examples include: Attempting to sabotage mail-in voting efforts immediately before the election; getting caught on tape trying to strong-arm Ukraine into investigating Hunter Biden; expecting his attorney general to investigate and/or imprison his political rivals; openly trying to steal the election via the courts right now.)

I'll stop there.

Because the problem here is much, much deeper than any single report. It's the context.

You've cried wolf literally dozens and dozens and dozens of times, yet you expect us to simply ignore all the bullshit and lies you peddled in the past.

You are praying for a magic report to come out of nowhere and save you. It's not happening.

If it existed, Trump's lawyers would have presented it from the beginning instead of repeatedly humiliating themselves and destroying their careers with these stillborn non-cases.

At this point, if you hypothetically DID find some smoking gun, it wouldn't be as a result of you following a chain of evidence from the beginning to its logical conclusion, it would be pure, blind luck.

This, by itself, is corrosive to our intellectual discourse on the basis of its raw stupidity alone. But the fact that you expect me to simply ignore the fact that this is an attack on ME is beyond insulting.

I'm also not going to play dumb and ignore the fact that you're trying to steal my vote, to silence my voice, to deny me participation in this democracy, to ignore the will of the people, to functionally end the world's oldest democracy, so you get to have...what, exactly? More zany Twitter rants?

Trump has zero serious policy proposals. He doesn't give a shit about his job. He couldn't even say what he'd accomplish in his second term. There's no tangible benefit to you beyond a abstract sense of validation.

You are torching a centuries-old democratic tradition to the ground for the guy who pretended to be Gary Busey's boss on a game show.

Fuck you. From the bottom of my heart, fuck. You.