Chris Graham: What I should have done is, I should have tried to overthrow the ACC

When I was a kid, I used to think that every time UVA lost a basketball game, it was because the refs cheated.

I’d get so mad at the TV.

Carolina refs! Then later, Duke refs!

They pay their players!

Loud noises!

I make fun of myself now as an AARP adult for those days.

My wife will ask me what the score in the Nats’ game is.

“San Diego is winning, 3-1, but it’s only because they’re cheating,” I’ll say, making something up about how they bought off the umpires, their guys are all on steroids, using aluminum bats, throwing spitballs.

Funny thing is, this is what counts as a Republican Party platform these days.

Whenever a Republican loses, it’s not because the Democrat got more votes, which happened, maybe, because the Democrat is a better candidate, ran a better campaign, resonated more with the voters.

It’s, they cheated!

The election was rigged!

Hugo Chavez helped them, or, err, it was a satellite in outer space!

Donald Trump has it so bad that he couldn’t even accept that he’d won the 2016 presidential election, because he hated the asterisk, that he’d lost the popular vote by 3 million to Hillary Clinton, and was declared the winner because the Electoral College is a dumb way to elect a president.

He spent the better part of the next four years claiming that an election he won was rigged!

Think about that for a second.

He won; and yet, it was still rigged against him.

It surprises no one that he started off the 2020 cycle telling everybody that election was going to also be rigged, and then when he lost, he tried to, you know, rig it back, calling the elections guy in Georgia to get him to find more votes, scheming to have fake electors cast votes to throw off the Electoral College, and when that didn’t work, he stoked up his white nationalist storm troopers to try to sack the Capitol as it certified the election result.

The only difference between Donald Trump and 2020 and me as a kid throwing a fit over UVA losing a basketball game is …

Gotta think about that one.

There were tantrums over the refs, raging fits over the games being rigged, lots of loud noises.

Yeah, the only difference is, I didn’t try to overthrow the ACC.