evidence: This strategy had a side effect McConnell probably didn’t foresee. Maintaining a total blockade on bipartisan legislation couldn’t be justified in narrow terms, like opposing the terms and parameters of President Obama’s legislative goals. Republicans could only justify their refusal to negotiate by insisting the very goals Obama wished them to join in solving — economic stimulus, expanding health coverage, and reducing carbon-dioxide emissions — were merely pretexts for his actual goal of extending government control over everything. They had to whip their base into a hysteria that Obama had a secret agenda — Muslim, socialist, perhaps both — to destroy the very fabric of America. [...] When Trump refused to concede the 2020 election, instead concocting preposterous lies that it had been stolen, McConnell shrugged again. "A few legal inquiries from the president do not exactly spell the end of the republic," he insisted. Indeed, Trump’s attempt to overturn the election was no different, somehow, than Democrats denouncing Russian election interference: "Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election."