With the results of the Electoral College votes in, supporters of Hillary Clinton must realize that their favored candidate has lost, again—this time irrevocably. The left’s resistance to a President Donald Trump hung on the twin thin reeds of a recount under Green Party candidate Jill Stein and the fight to convince individual electors to be faithless.

Ironically, the efforts led to more popular votes for Trump, and more electors choosing not to vote for Hillary. Five electors from Washington state went against Hillary, and three more tried, but were forbidden by state law, while only two Republican electors chose someone other than Trump. PJ Media reports that in Detroit, officials could not recount in 392 districts due to “discrepancies.” Those discrepancies include having more votes tallied than voters, and 95 percent of the vote in Detroit went to Hillary. So the recount also exposed apparent Democratic chicanery.

The excuses Democrats have made for why Hillary lost are endless, as the left circles the wagons and decides whether to blame themselves—or others, like the Russians. To date, some of the many possible culprits for the failure include: FBI Director James Comey’s last-minute investigation into the Anthony Weiner laptop emails, the Clinton Foundation scandal, Hillary’s classified emails on an unsecured server, her failure to campaign in Michigan, her lies about Benghazi, the Project Veritas videos, the Clintons’ treatment of women, the hacked John Podesta emails, her collusion with the Democratic National Committee to take the nomination away from Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Obama’s failure to control our borders, Obamacare, and Hillary’s and Obama’s failed foreign policy. And, of course, one cannot discount the impact that Trump’s more energetic campaign had on the upset win. Or, as Bill Clinton called it, Trump’s ability to connect with “angry, white men.”

Joe Klein writes for Time Magazine that “[Trump] is, without question, the most expert news manipulator in American history.” This is absurd. The news media have never been so openly hostile to a candidate, and Trump won in spite of that, not because he “manipulated” the media to his advantage.

The exact cause of Trump’s win is unknowable. It is likely made up of many of the above mentioned factors. Yet in the recriminations game, some Clinton loyalists are forming a circular firing squad, blaming long-time advisor Huma Abedin, who one anonymous Clinton insider said got too used to the limelight and being a “celebrity.” A Clinton insider said that “The real anger is toward Hillary’s inner circle…They reinforced all the bad habits.”

Liberals also continue to incessantly blame Russia for the Trump win. President Obama claimed in what may well be his final press conference on December 16 that he told Russian President Vladimir Putin to “cut it out” and stop hacking, and that Russia did, reports The Hill. “No, they did not stop. They came after us absolutely every day until the end of the election. They tried to hack into our system repeatedly,” argued DNC interim chair Donna Brazile on ABC’s This Week. Maybe Obama didn’t scare Putin quite as much as he thought he did.

Actually, by December 20, the White House story had changed. Now, according to NBC News, President Obama called the Russians on October 31 from his Red Phone, which is a direct line between Moscow and Washington to be used only in a time of crisis, “to reinforce Obama’s September warning that the U.S. would consider any interference on Election Day a grave matter. This time Obama used the phrase ‘armed conflict.’” If Putin had “cut it out” back in September, why was that call necessary?

The conspiracy theory that Russia aimed its resources at defeating presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is “hyperbole” at best, and at worst, a false narrative, argues Jonathan S. Tobin for Commentary Magazine. “Other than a couple of quotes from speeches that had gone unreported, there was nothing that was directly linked to Clinton,” he notes of the hacked Podesta emails.

What the hacks did reveal was extensive collusion between the Democrats and the mainstream media, as well as how the DNC had played favorites in the primary, putting its thumb on the scale for Hillary’s benefit, and to the detriment of Sanders.

“Assume the Russians were behind the hacking and even that Vladimir Putin personally directed these efforts,” Tobin writes, “there is no reason to believe it altered the outcome, let alone that it was a result of collusion with the Trump camp.”

The Election Results Deniers continue to press onward with this particular conspiracy theory because it provides a convenient bogeyman whose influence cannot be confirmed or discounted—and is based upon the word of anonymous Intelligence Community (IC) sources. The fact that the IC refused to present their evidence to Congress, even in closed session, plus the Obama administration’s record of dishonesty and a lack of transparency, contribute to the skepticism. Yet Trump is apparently expected to state unequivocally that he accepts this phony consensus that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies have supposedly determined that the Russians hacked the election for the purpose of electing him president.

But when Hillary’s team questions the FBI’s motives, that’s perfectly okay. “Comparing the FBI’s massive response to the overblown email scandal with the seemingly lackadaisical response to the very real Russian plot to subvert a national election shows that something is deeply broken at the FBI,” argued Clinton campaign manager John Podesta in a Washington Post op-ed.

The public isn’t buying the sore losers’ blame game. A recent Morning Consult/Politico survey found that “46 percent of respondents chose” the option that “said the U.S. can’t be sure who is primarily responsible for the hacking because tracing cyberattacks is complicated and because intelligence groups were wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

Back during the general campaign, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews argued that Trump’s refusal to say unequivocally that he would accept the election results was “sacrilege.” Hillary Clinton called it “horrifying.” “I’ve loved American democracy all my life,” said Matthews, “and not just because it’s our ennobling way to rule ourselves, and we are the first and the best at it, but because it honors in the end the character and patriotism of those who walk out there and accept the country’s judgment, who risk their pride in the arena of public opinion and when it’s decided, accept the people’s verdict.” Apparently that principle is only meant to apply to Republicans.

Even with the Electoral College having affirmed Trump’s victory, some on the left still hope to derail his path to the White House. Some are dreaming of getting this before the Supreme Court to challenge the results of the election based on Trump’s foreign ties. And if that fails?

Though Trump’s victory was once again confirmed this week, MSNBC, the network committed to discrediting Trump on every show, every day, won’t give up. A recent guest, Anna Galland, executive director of the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org Civic Action, told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes about the left’s next likely tactic: “A mass, moral accessible opposition movement, some are calling it a resistance movement, that’s going to stand up and fight back and not let Donald Trump tear apart this country, or enact his extraordinarily extreme policy agenda that he has no mandate to enact.” She added, “We’re not going to stand by while Donald Trump tears apart America…We’re going to keep fighting and going to win.” She said that MoveOn.org’s protest against the Iraq War was a “trial run” with “a million people in the streets…but that’s nothing compared to what we’re going to see.”

So much for accepting the results of our Constitutional election process.

In 2008, President Barack Obama contemptuously described voters from small-town America as “bitter” and “cling[ing] to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” With the election of Trump, those on the left who refuse to accept reality have become the modern bitter clingers, the progressives who continue to oppose Trump by any means.

They envision the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution as another way to challenge Trump as president. “Mr. Trump’s companies do business with entities controlled by foreign governments and people with ties to them,” reported The New York Times on November 21. “Experts in legal ethics say those kinds of arrangements could easily run afoul of the Emoluments Clause if they continue after Mr. Trump takes office.” The clause forbids presidents to “‘accept of any present, emolument, office or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince or foreign state’ unless Congress consents,” reports the Times. In other words, one possible response to Trump breaking this clause is to impeach him.

No matter how illegitimate, ridiculous, or short-sighted the reasons, the left will continue to oppose a Donald Trump presidency and work to undermine it. The same media that spent eight years building up and protecting President Obama’s phony legacy are now determined to destroy Trump’s presidency right from the start. This honeymoon is definitely over.

Roger Aronoff