Knives to a Gunfight (Redux)

Over the past week, we have wrestled with a problem well described by the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan:

How do you cover something that, at worst, lays the groundwork for a coup attempt and, at best, represents a brazen lie that could be deeply damaging to American democracy?

“You don’t want to fearmonger. You don’t want to underplay something this dangerous, either,” Noah Shachtman, editor of the Daily Beast, told me.

The trickiest part: “Figuring out whether these bogus accusations are actually dangerous to the republic or just the last, lame gasps of a doomed administration.”

Sullivan doesn’t answer the question, though she does deftly assess the state of play:

I’d argue that they’re both. Not because they pose more than a sliver of a chance of overturning the reality that Joe Biden will take office in January. Rather, because the constant drumbeat that the election was somehow illegitimate does harm all by itself.

Lately we have seen reports that Trump knows he lost the presidential race (I guess he is “like, really smart” after all, as he has often bragged), but is “challenging the 2020 election results primarily just as ‘theater,’ as he puts on a “performance” for his supporters.” Alternatively — or perhaps in conjunction — we are also told that this is a…