Quick(ish) take: Narratives and vulnerability

 Trump lost.  Ha-ha!  Yes, in some sense, it matters.  It matters that Trump will not be able to call up the Secretary of State in Georgia and flip however many votes he needs to get those electoral college votes.  He may win Georgia fair-in-square, but he'll have to do so, rather than just stealing the state by getting the Secretary of State to steal it for him.  This matters.  What else matters?  That is harder to say.  Trump tried to flip a bunch of races, and he did not succeed, but I keep telling you that his endorsements are not magic pixie dust.  Why not?  Because endorsements are never magic pixie dust.  They matter in low-profile elections, but in high visibility races, they just don't matter all that much.  Not even Trump's endorsements.  There is no contradiction between this observation and the centrality of Trump's role in the GOP.  He just isn't a magic pixie.

However.

Narratives can matter, not because they are right, but because they create self-fulfilling prophesies.  One of the things that has puzzled me-- and I have noted this-- is that Trump has repeatedly endorsed losers.  Like a loser.  Which he is.  A loser.  Trump's a loser.  LO-SER!  Sorrynotsorry.  Anyway, why do people attribute magic powers of winner-ism to Losie McLoser?  Here's the power of the narrative.  Narratives are bullshit.  They are constructed on the basis of observation and confirmation bias rather than scientific hypothesis testing.  However, once you get to the point that you notice the disconfirmation, the old narrative falls apart, and a new narrative begins to unfold.

And that one may not favor Losie McLoser.

LO-SER!

Trump was never a winner.  He was a whiner and a liar, who got very lucky in 2016 with a combination of factors, including the two-term penalty hitting the Dems, and then Jim Comey, but he is the living manifestation of dumb luck whose luck ran out, leaving nothing but dumb.  At which point, he's just a loser, and once a narrative of "loser" develops, confirmation bias works the other way.  A new narrative, true or not, creates its own effect in peoples' heads.

What effect?  Well, not much, at least initially.  Mostly, we can stop talking about the Trump endorsement.  The potential is if Republicans at the elite level decide that the impotence of Donald...

...

with respect to endorsements will allow them to challenge him on other matters.

An aura of invincibility is bullshit, as all auras are.  And once visibly punctured, once god bleeds, he ain't god no more.

So how's about some music?

Third Rail, "Dusted," from South Delta Space Age.