Donald Trump is running out of options. In a late Wednesday afternoon tweet he “claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes,” to have won the states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan. He hasn’t actually won them—votes are still being counted—but to win reelection, he needs to.

The writing is on the wall. Numb staffers told me Wednesday Trump was “beyond angry.”

Earlier in the day a White House staffer, recognizing Trump’s chances of winning were fading fast, said they would “go to the mattresses” and file court challenges to try to claim a victory Trump couldn’t win at the ballot box.

It was the culmination of a week of election craziness in the Trump camp.

The president ended his 2020 reelection bid on Monday in Grand Rapids, Michigan—the same place he ended his 2016 run.

His traveling campaign roadshow featured as many as five rallies a day in the so-called blue-wall states and in the Sun Belt, where Trump’s team told him he needed to find more votes. The president, recently recovered from coronavirus thanks to $100,000 in experimental therapy, rose to the challenge.

A superstitious man, Trump chose Grand Rapids as a good luck charm. What may have been the last campaign rally of his political career began oddly, as most Trump rallies do. As Air Force One taxied to the hangar where thousands of loyal fans waited, David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” played over a loudspeaker. Trump’s children and their significant others then made their way to the stage as Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” blasted forth, the president not yet disembarked from the “tin can” of the jumbo jet. Don Junior waved to the crowds and flashed his toothy smile as the pro-working-class lyrics boomed: “Where the dogs of society howl / You can’t plant me in your penthouse / I’m going back to my plough.”

In his rambling 75-minute rally rant Trump pulled out all the stops, laughing at his Democratic opponent, former vice president Joe Biden. “Can you imagine the concept of losing to this guy?” Trump asked, saying if he loses, “I’ll never come back.” At other rallies he’d made the same threat to not return to states where he lost. Far from being insulted, the crowds just cheered.

They cheered loudly in Grand Rapids as Trump claimed he was running against the establishment, when as the incumbent he is the establishment. He claimed Biden screwed up the national response to the H1N1 “swine flu” virus outbreak in 2009, but on the day Trump spoke, the total number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. was nearly 9.5 million, with close to 235,000 dead. Yet Trump said the U.S. was “rounding the turn” on the virus—his favorite way to dismiss concerns. The crowd cheered again.

As he continued ranting, he said Joe Biden is against guns, oil, Texas and God and predicted a “great red wave like nobody’s ever seen before.” More cheers.

Then Trump really let loose. Without stating any goals for his second term, Trump told us if Biden is elected the economy will falter, there will be riots, the suburbs will be destroyed, the government will collapse and health care will be nonexistent. Further, terrorists will swarm over the border, crime will be rampant, the Midwest will be a refugee camp, cities will be on lockdown and all manufacturing will shut down as China and Russia take over the United States. Drug addicts will roam free and public schools will falter while children never learn how to worship the flag. Socialism will spread worse than the pandemic and the “swamp” and the “deep state” will take over.

It sounded laughably like the “disaster of biblical proportions” the Ghostbusters warned of—“fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling, 40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together—mass hysteria!”

“Take back our country,” Trump shouted to his adoring fans—even though he’s the president and the chief executive of the country. His fans clapped and cheered. Trump said his opponent was guilty of treason. They cheered. They cheered when he cleared his throat.

Trump called himself “perhaps the most innocent man anywhere in the history of the United States…. You are so lucky I’ve agreed to be your president.” His fans gushed and cheered some more. Trump smiled every time someone complimented him. After all, he said we were lucky to have him. Toward the end of his rant he introduced rapper Lil Pump, who had sworn fealty to Trump and vowed to leave the country if he lost. Trump initially called him Little Pimp, laughing before correcting himself. The crowd cheered.

A short time later Trump walked off the stage and danced to “Y.M.C.A.” with Vice President Mike Pence, who first seemed to look over to “Mother”—his wife—for approval. Then Trump headed home. On Election Day morning he appeared on Fox & Friends, obviously exhausted and sounding anything but confident of victory. Critics say his last two weeks of campaigning lacked focus, beyond painting Biden as a socialist—a tactic that seemed to help Trump with Cuban Americans in South Florida but was of questionable effectiveness elsewhere. Trump, the pundits said, was out of gas.

Trump did little to counter that sentiment when in the late morning he talked about losing—a word he had always reserved for others, never himself. “Winning is easy. Losing is never easy, not for me it’s not,” he told reporters as he traveled to his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

Trump even took a break from his favorite hobby: tweeting insults and lies. For hours on Election Day he was silent—unseen and unheard. The absence of a Marine guard in front of the West Wing told the world that the president wasn’t there, even as reporters from around the world gathered outside. Trump was holed up in the residence, probably binge-watching Fox News and trying to find out if he was going to lose the election in the landslide many predicted. Of course Trump said he felt confident, but after four years of lies, few close to the White House would believe Trump if he told them his hair was on fire and could prove it.

As the first precincts closed on Tuesday evening, Trump proved once again the saying often attributed to 20th-century journalist H.L. Mencken: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

Trump won Florida, in part by convincing Cuban American voters that Biden was an American Fidel Castro. Slowly but surely Trump racked up win after win in most of the same states he won in 2016, not only proving Mencken right, but making P.T. Barnum’s ghost smile—a sucker is indeed born every minute. Shortly before one A.M. EST on Wednesday, Biden told his supporters he was on a path to victory in a drive-in speech that came complete with the honking of horns and a pronouncement to “Keep the faith.”

Meanwhile Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and former advisor Kellyanne Conway were hunkered down in the East Room eating hors d’oeuvres with a couple hundred other Trump faithful who weren’t wearing masks. Trump himself remained silent in the residence, apparently taking in the news.

When Fox News called Arizona for Biden, the Trump minions howled it was too early. Conway stormed out of the East Room to chastise Fox for making the projection. By then it was obvious that the path to victory for either candidate would be through the so-called blue-wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

By one A.M. EST a fearful Trump could stand it no more. He said he would announce “a big win” and tweeted, “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!”

Twitter immediately labeled his tweet as misleading.

Just before 2:30 A.M. Trump showed up in the East Room and proclaimed himself the winner. “The results are phenomenal,” Trump said, adding, “We’re winning Pennsylvania by a tremendous amount.” It was a lie.

How did Trump manage to even get close to a reelection victory? He is a flyspeck of a man with no interest in governing and no ability to do so. He is a puffed-up second-rate stand-up comedian with no sense of decorum and no concern for the populace.

The country is more polarized than ever, and Trump knows how to play that. He long ago figured out he doesn’t have to unify the country, he only needs to cleave it in two. That’s where we are in 2020: divided and disgusted—with some delighted.

And Trump? He claimed Wednesday morning he won states he hadn’t won, and he lied about the outcome of the election. He tried to declare victory when there was none—typical Trump.

As both Michigan and Wisconsin fell into Biden’s column on Wednesday, one Trump official told me, “I don’t like math, but I can do the math. It doesn’t look good for us.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, separating himself from Trump, told reporters “claiming you won the election is different from finishing the counting” of votes. Trump, sounding desperate, tweeted “there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!” Another lie.

Earlier Trump had said, “Nobody has seen anything like this.”

And on that he was absolutely right.