As might be expected, President Trump, fearing that his quest for four more years of destructive behavior emanating from the White House, launched into a crying fest as soon as it appeared that he was not going to sweep all 50 states in Tuesday’s election, as his internal polling might have suggested.

But his crying and whining were nothing compared with his millions of followers who were preparing themselves for anything that their guru might ask them to do. They metaphorically saddled up and packed their guns and were set to go where the most vulnerable supporters of Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden, the Democrat, would be trying to vote and, afterwards, to try to find out what the score was.

They can be quite scary; those Trump supporters, with their assault weapons carried in front of their bulletproof vests, since some of them have shot people and killed a few unarmed people. Like their leader, they are big and tough when it comes to confronting peaceful demonstrators and seekers of electoral information, all of them unarmed. There have been Trumpists who have flocked to areas of polling places, but they’ve been especially loud and threatening in the places where the ballots were being counted, as if they can magically convert them to Trump ballots if they look mean enough.

It hasn’t worked and it’s not likely to work. The good people who are counting ballots will just continue to do their job despite the whining of the president about how unfairly he has been treated. The results will be announced when the counting is done. In a democracy, even the frayed example that’s called democracy in the U.S., voting is one of the signs that democracy is not completely gone.

Trump tried in a middle-of-the-night “press conference” to claim victory and to claim that the election of 2020 is a fraud and that he actually won. Even his Republican sycophants were stunned by his ridiculous charge. That is nothing new for the Orange Buffoon, since he’s been whining that he has been treated unfairly since he lost the popular vote in 2016 and was declared president via the outdated Electoral College. Poor Donald. He has been beset by just about everyone since he has been president and he only has friends in the dark places of the Internet, plus Fox News, One American News Network, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, KKK groups, and the new boy on the block, QAnon.

The list of his incompetence, ignorance of history and foreign affairs, destruction of environmental laws and regulations to benefit fossil fuel corporations, appointments of incompetents to the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and so many other agencies is endless. Right now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, he has rejected the science and all of the expert advice about how to contain the disease and has made the U.S. the leader in deaths from Covid-19, no matter how it’s calculated. In fact, studies have shown that the places in the U.S., in which the virus is most deadly, are concentrations of his supporters. He has, in effect, sickened and killed his own supporters, by calling huge numbers of them to maskless, close-contact rallies during the campaign.

When he was a candidate, he bragged that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue (in New York) and he wouldn’t lose a voter. He has outdone himself, though, because his refusal to actually confront the pandemic has killed plenty of Americans. And, he has not lost a voter! In fact, he may have gained a few during the current campaign. It’s remarkable how so many Americans can fall for a con-job.

The American electorate has not come too far from the days of the traveling snake oil salesmen who wandered the frontier selling their wares, without unhitching their horses, because they might have need for a speedy exit from the scene of their con. Trump is fearful of the need for a speedy exit, but there is no place for him to go except possibly Mar-a-Lago, which could be underwater in a few short years because of melting ice caps, ice shelves, and glaciers caused by global heating, which he denies.

The great surprise for many seasoned observers is how Trump has not lost any support, despite his ignorance and incompetence and malfeasance. Fully half the country is willing to accept all of his flaws which include racism, sexism, xenophobia, caging of children, building a destructive wall on the southern frontier to keep out all those brown people from the south, investing the economic substance of the country in military and defense projects that already are greater than the next half-dozen rich countries combined, his failure to provide programs for housing, education, repair of roads and bridges, and his assault on any kind of universal health care (he says he has a plan that is better than that which exists, but in four years, he has never shown even an outline). This is a short list.

What has he done to protect his privileged place as president? He has sued to stop the vote count in some places and he has threatened to sue anywhere he thinks it will be to his advantage. It’s what he does best, since he’s used the courts to cheat and defraud others, workers and contractors, for most of his life. Why doesn’t it seem to be working in a presidential election? Simply because there has been no evidence of fraud or abuse of the voting systems in the 50 states. They’re doing their jobs and they’re doing it well, so Trump can look forward to other losses in his mass of lawsuits designed to wreck the count in any state he thinks he needs to win.

Unfortunately for Trump, the media and others, including international observers of this election, saw no evidence of fraud or abuse of the voting system, as Trump has claimed. The AP reported on Thursday, “Michael Georg Link, a German lawmaker who heads an observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told German public broadcaster rbb Thursday that ‘on the election day itself, we couldn’t see any violations’ at the U.S. polling places they visited.” Link expressed surprise at Trump’s claim of fraud, because the U.S. has a “long history” of mail-in ballots going back to the 19th Century. That was never good enough for Trump to the extent that he had a commission, heavy with Republicans, investigate voter fraud, and the agency was disbanded because it could find no evidence of the fraud Trump claimed.

The president is flailing to find a way to wrest a win from the people, regardless of the counting of the ballots that could very well find him what he hates most, being a loser. Yet, half of the electorate stands by him (possibly not enough for him to win) and would do his bidding. For what reason, nobody knows and historians and political scientists will be studying this half of Americans far into the future.

Although it may be apocryphal, there is a story about an encounter between a citizen and Benjamin Franklin on a Philadelphia street where the founders were hammering out the documents that provide the basis for the political and governing system that has lasted some 240 years. She asked, “Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?” He answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Trump’s half of the American people may be proving that the country is not up to keeping a republic.