Trump
© Tia DufourPresident Donald Trump at the White House
Members of the Electoral College don't formally meet to elect the next president until Dec. 14, but as far as the media and corporate elite are concerned, Joe Biden is already president-elect. This, even though President Trump's re-election campaign is still legally pursuing allegations of voting irregularities.

Whatever the merits of those complaints, the Constitution doesn't give the media, Hollywood, Silicon Valley or the Fortune 500 the power to choose our next commander-in-chief. We have specific legal mechanisms and deadlines in place. But Trumpers are nonetheless being told to sit down and shut up.

The president's supporters might be forgiven for not rushing to submit after four years of a sustained, systemic gaslighting of the American people. Those bellowing from the hilltops about the dangers of not accepting election outcomes are the same people who never accepted the ­legitimacy of Trump's presidency.

For the past four years, leftist ­activists and the Democratic Party have tried their best to oust Trump by any means, including hallucinogenic dreams of invoking the 25th Amendment and a totally ­unhinged, baseless and petty ­impeachment push.

They stymied Team Trump's ­attempts to govern with a hodgepodge of obstructive probes and manufactured scandals. The most prominent of these, the Russia "collusion" hoax, cast a pall over the first two years of the administration and ended up a complete bust. Democrats' risible impeachment push, based on a brief phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, was so quickly discredited that it became a total nonissue in the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, the media at every turn have sought to portray Trump as a racist, white-supremacist reprobate, notwithstanding the fact he has an Orthodox Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren. The media and Democrats repeatedly lied about what Trump did and didn't say after the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Va. They routinely lumped together all Trump supporters as a bunch of backwoods yahoos — "deplorables," to borrow Hillary Clinton's phrasing — who pine for the days when (actual) systemic ­racism pervaded the nation.

The media have often railed against the alleged violent tendencies of gun-toting Trump supporters. But as the anarchy of Portland, Ore., and Kenosha, Wis., made clear a few months ago, the most conspicuous threat of political violence in this nation is posed to conservatives by the Democratic Party's vindictive antifa-Black Lives Matter wing.

But it gets even worse. In this most unprecedented of elections, many states illegally changed their basic election/voting-related laws midstream — and then had state and federal courts legitimize these unconstitutional attempts to deprive state legislatures of their exclusive power to regulate the time and manner of elections. Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans hosted war-game exercises in which they mused longingly about a military coup. The Democratic attorney general in a key swing state, Pennsylvania, boasted before Election Day about how Biden would surely prevail.

The political polling industry, which apparently failed to correct any of its errors from the 2016 election, was so catastrophically off that one must seriously wonder whether any pollsters may have deliberately misled prospective voters in a psychological attempt to artificially depress GOP turnout. In Wisconsin, which Biden ­ultimately carried by less than 1 percent, the ABC/Washington Post poll less than a week before Election Day had the ex-veep up a whopping 17 points. It is difficult to contemplate how a pollster can be that wide of the mark.

And now, after four years of ­relentlessly fighting a president they never accepted, running a sordid character-assassination campaign against that president's second Supreme Court nominee, they have the temerity to tell us all to pipe down and get on board with calling Biden president-elect — all while the president has yet to exhaust the litigation and ­recount options granted him ­under our system.

Sorry, no.

Free republics don't long survive in a state like this — not when most of the country's ruling class, and all its leading institutions, are in a de facto state of war with half of the citizenry. Stop gaslighting us — and do it now.