Did you miss it? On Tuesday, the electoral college made official what we’ve known for six weeks: Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris for the presidency.

Americans could be excused for being unaware that electors met in all 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia to cast votes. In nearly every presidential election year, the constitutionally required but largely ceremonial event passes with little notice. The tragic exception, of course, was in 2020: Loser Trump followed weeks of lies and scores of lawsuits alleging election fraud with an illegal scheme creating fake pro-Trump electors in battleground states — a prelude to the violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. (Unlike Trump, his accomplices in the scheme are, justly, still being prosecuted.)

It’s great that the transfer of power is proceeding peacefully, as it always has except at the onset of the Civil War, and, yes, in 2021. Yet you can thank President Biden, Vice President Harris and their fellow Democratic good losers for that, not Trump. No one can credibly doubt that, had he lost again, he’d be raising another ruckus. Or worse, that there’d be violence. Trump suggested as much, telling Time in April, “If we don’t win, you know, it depends.”

States and the federal government prepared for mayhem that never came. Gabriel Sterling, the top Georgia election officer who four years ago publicly and presciently warned Trump that “someone’s going to get killed” because of his provocations, and who endured death threats himself, said of the electors’ meeting this week, “To be honest, I forgot about it.”

As Trump declared in last month’s victory speech, “It’s time to unite.”

But as Biden said afterward in congratulating him: “You can’t love your country only when you win.”

Biden — who still hasn’t received Trump’s acknowledgment of Biden’s 2020 victory, let alone congratulations, and who, thanks to Trump, is considered illegitimate by seven of 10 Republicans — expressed hope that “we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. … It can be trusted, win or lose.”

Indeed. And that’s why, in this week of the uneventful electoral college vote, Americans should take the occasion to note the damage that Trump has wrought to the citizenry’s faith in elections by his years of demagogically disparaging them — instead of joining him and his MAGA minions in memory-holing their falsehoods about election fraud.

Trump has gone silent about “rigged” elections since he won in November. And yet, up to the final hours of voting, he was crying foul. “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” he posted on election day.

City and state officials, including Seth Bluestein, a Republican member of Philadelphia’s board of elections, reposted Trump’s lie to insist there was “absolutely no truth” to it. For that, Bluestein suffered antisemitic attacks and threats online. Countless election workers have known the feeling. Thanks, Trump.

Days earlier, Trump claimed, “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before.” He spread a false conspiracy theory of vote stealing in one county, adding, “We caught them cold.” No, he hadn’t; there were no vote thieves to catch.

After Trump won Pennsylvania — surprise! — he clammed up about Democrats’ alleged heists there and in all six other battleground states that he carried, including four states governed by Democrats. I guess as vote riggers go, Democrats are just inept?

Even before the election, Trump stifled his talk that early and mail voting are rife with fraud, but only after advisors, apoplectic that Republican candidates were being shortchanged, appealed to his “yuge” ego: “Sir, your people are so excited to vote for you that they want to as soon as they can,” one said during an April meeting at Mar-a-Lago. “You gotta tell them it’s OK.”

Trump has not, however, changed his tune about the 2020 election. The president-elect continues to lie that he won it, so routinely that reporters let it go unchecked. What’s worse, looking ahead, is that Trump reportedly is making fealty to his election lies a job requirement for appointees to high-level administration posts.

So it is that he’s tapped former Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to be U.S. attorney general. She was part of “the first wave of the Big Lie,” as former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin put it to the House Jan. 6 investigation committee. Bondi rushed to Pennsylvania after the 2020 election to spread disinformation about dead voters and ballot dumps. She was with lead election denier Rudy Giuliani for Team Trump’s ludicrous news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in a Philadelphia industrial park. And she was fulminating on Fox News: “We are not going anywhere until they declare Trump won Pennsylvania.”

In 2022, former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the Jan. 6 committee that Bondi contacted her before she testified to press Hutchinson to remain loyal to Trump, according to the Washington Post. (Yet it’s former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, that House Republicans now want prosecuted for witness tampering for her talks with Hutchinson.) This year, Bondi echoed Trump’s falsehoods about noncitizens voting from her platform as a leader of a pro-Trump policy institute. And she promised retribution for Trump’s indictments: “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted.”

No doubt Bondi as the next attorney general would carry out Trump’s calls for the Justice Department to investigate the 2020 election, to prosecute Biden and to get House Jan. 6 committee members behind bars.

“Is she going to continue … pushing out the Big Lie?” California’s new Democratic senator and Jan. 6 committee veteran Adam Schiff recently asked on MSNBC.

That was a rhetorical question, of course.

@jackiekcalmes

The House on Thursday night failed to pass a spending measure that would have funded the federal government through mid-March, extended the farm bill for one year, suspended the debt ceiling for two years and provided new disaster aid.

The bill was considered under a special procedure that suspends the regular rules of the House but requires a supermajority of two-thirds voting yes in order to pass. Nearly all Democrats voted against it, as did a number of hard-right lawmakers who oppose raising the debt limit without additional spending cuts. Congress must extend government funding before a Friday night deadline in order to avoid a shutdown.

Congressional leaders had scrambled to come up with a new plan after some Republicans, fueled by President-elect Donald. J. Trump and Elon Musk, rejected a separate spending deal struck between Speaker Mike Johnson and Democrats that included several additional policy measures but did not address the debt limit.

How Every Representative Voted

House Republicans failed to secure the majority votes needed Thursday on a spending bill to avert a government shutdown by week’s end, handing a decisive loss to President-elect Trump in an early test of his ability to unite Republicans in the chamber. 

The bill failed by a vote of 235-174, including 38 Republicans who voted down the legislation. 

The bill not only failed the method that allowed lawmakers to fast-track it with a two-thirds majority. It also failed to pass by normal standards, which require a threshold of 218 “yea” votes. 

TRUMP-BACKED SPENDING BILL TO AVERT GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN FAILS HOUSE VOTE

Among the 38 Republicans who voted against the bill was Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who torched the funding legislation in a speech on the House floor. 

Roy, who spent much of the day Thursday sparring with Trump over Roy’s opposition to the deal, noted that the measure would allow $5 trillion to be added to the national debt, cutting against the GOP’s tenet of fiscal responsibility. 

Roy said Republicans who voted to approve the measure lack “self-respect.” 

“I am absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility and has the temerity to go forward to the American people and say you think this is fiscally responsible,” said Roy, who had also opposed the first spending bill. “It is absolutely ridiculous.”

Still, the number of Republicans who failed to fall in line Thursday evening could signal bigger challenges ahead for Trump, who had sought to bend House Speaker Mike Johnson and others in the chamber’s GOP majority to his political will and pass through a new bill with a higher debt ceiling.

That bill sparked opposition from Democrats, who were more broadly opposed to the idea, and from fiscal conservatives within the Republican Party.

President-elect Trump, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr. at UFC 309 at Madison Square Garden in New York Nov. 16. (Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)

With $36 trillion in debt and a $1.8 trillion deficit in 2024, some conservatives are against a continuing resolution, which punts the funding deadline to March and keeps spending at 2024 levels. The deal Trump had pushed for would have included a two-year suspension of the debt limit, sparking further opposition among some Republicans.

‘HELL NO’: HOUSE DEMS ERUPT OVER GOP SPENDING DEAL

That divide put pressure on Democrats, who had widely signaled their intent Thursday to oppose the legislation. Minority leaders spent most of the day railing against Trump and Elon Musk for interfering in the process and tanking the first spending deal, which had been slated to pass Wednesday night with bipartisan support. 

Ahead of the vote on the new bill Thursday, Democrats led chants of “hell no,” sending a clear signal of their displeasure over the way the new spending bill was teed up. 

President-elect Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., are struggling to prevent a government shutdown. (Getty Images)

Following the bill’s failure, Johnson immediately began huddling with a group of House Republicans who had voted against the bill in a likely attempt to shore up support for another vote Friday.

“Very disappointing to us that all but two Democrats voted against aid to farmers and ranchers, against disaster relief, against all these bipartisan measures that had already been negotiated and decided upon,” Johnson said after the failed vote. “Again, the only difference in this legislation was that we would push the debt ceiling to January 2027. 

“I want you all to remember that it was just last spring that the same Democrats berated Republicans and said that it was irresponsible to hold the debt limit, the debt ceiling hostage.”