As the US speeds past the tragic mark of a quarter of a million Covid-19 deaths, its President is sulking in the White House over an election he lost fair and square and obstructing the effort by his soon-to-be successor, Joe Biden, to stand up a fight against the fast-worsening pandemic.
President Donald Trump is fixated on his failing, threadbare challenges to the election and is tweet-spreading lies about vote fraud, instead of using his platform and power to confront a once-in-a-century health emergency he falsely assured the nation was all but over.
He hasn't appeared at a public event for days and has forbidden any members of his administration to talk to Biden's team. Also, as part of the President's evidence-free quest to challenge the election, his administration is holding up millions of dollars in funding and access mandated by transition laws.
Trump's outrageous presidency has conditioned the world to his incessant flouting of the duties of the office and indifference to the national interest. But it is an extraordinary and unprecedented scenario that in the world's oldest democracy, a President is refusing to admit the clear result of an election in which Americans voted to eject him from office.
Many of Trump's legal challenges -- in Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan -- rest on the idea that isolated problems or unproven claims of fraud should require throwing out hundreds of thousands of legally cast American votes.
On Thursday, the Trump campaign dropped its federal lawsuit in Michigan that alleged voting irregularities and had asked the court to stop certification of the votes in Wayne County as two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers said they wanted to "rescind" their votes to certify the results from the county.