Populists love drama. They love drama so much that both leaders and led can find it difficult to distinguish what is real from what is not.1 The line between rhetoric and actually enacting political change blurs. Their outrages tempt their opponents to a response in kind, which risks its own loss of reality. The best way to respond may be simply to ignore the histrionics. That was the path chosen by the Biden transition team, ignoring the increasingly manic attempts by Trump and his entourage to deny their defeat. The result in the final months of 2020 was that the U.S. political system was
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