I consider myself a logical person, and I consider many of the readers of the Times News to be equally logical.

We had an election on Nov. 3. The results were clear. President-elect Joe Biden captured 306 electoral votes to President Donald Trump’s 242. In the process, Biden amassed more than 7 million votes more than Trump. While the popular vote is not a determination of who wins the presidency, the margin of victory is breathtaking.

Democratic and Republican election officials in virtually every state praised the conduct and fairness of the process and controls. Independent foreign observers agreed. The U.S. Attorney General, a Trump appointee, agreed. Election officials of both parties in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada all concluded that Biden won their states in fair elections. In Georgia, the results were retabulated three times.

Finally, on Dec. 14, 538 electors of the Electoral College gathered in their respective states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots reflecting the will of their states’ voters.

Despite all of this, Trump continued to tweet baseless and unsubstantiated claims that he won the election “by a lot” and that the Democrats and other unspecified malevolents had “stolen the election.”

This is so pathetically illogical given all of the evidence to the contrary and none of the substantiation that Trump and his allies have alleged.

More than four dozen lawsuits were brought challenging election results in these battleground states. They were argued before Democrat and Republican judges, some Trump appointees. With one minor exception, which might have changed 200 votes, they were dismissed as being without merit. Even at the Supreme Court, where three of the nine justices are recent Trump appointees, the justices unanimously found the two cases that wound up at its doorstep basically meritless. Still not satisfied, the Trump legal team filed a third challenge to Pennsylvania’s results with the high court on Sunday.

Although Trump praised his appointees to the high heavens when he nominated them, after the court’s decision, he sang a different tune about their competency. Trump tweeted that the high court’s Dec. 11 decision brought by the Texas attorney general and signed on to by other Republicans attorneys general and GOP members of Congress was a “disgraceful miscarriage of justice.”

By the way, this is one of the major reasons why Supreme Court justices serve a life term. They do not have to be beholden to even the president who appoints them if the legal action being brought before them defies logic or merit.

This all-out affront on democratic principles is serving another purpose, and it has been extremely successful for Trump. It has cemented his control over the Republican Party and sets him up to be a formidable force even after he leaves the White House on Jan. 20.

His possibly running in 2024 to try to become just the second president in U.S. history to win nonconsecutive terms - the other was Grover Cleveland in 1892 - will freeze the field of potential GOP candidates until Trump either announces his candidacy or gives them his blessing to announce theirs.

The hold Trump has on the party can be seen in microcosm right here in our own backyard. U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser, whose district includes Carbon and Schuylkill counties, was one of the 126 House Republicans to sign on to the ill-fated Texas lawsuit that the Supreme Court dismissed in that three-sentence decision Dec. 11.

Now here is another area where logic comes in. Meuser won re-election over Democratic challenger Gary Wegman by more than 174,000 votes - 232,988-118,266. That’s right, Meuser won 66.3% of the vote on the same ballot where Trump’s name appeared. Meuser is not contesting his vote numbers, nor is he contesting the vote results of any other contest on this ballot, only Trump’s. Trump handily won the 9th Congressional District vote, but not by as much as Meuser did.

And what about all of the other Republican successes in this year’s general election? The GOP gained nearly a dozen House seats and may hold on to a majority in the Senate depending on the outcome of two Georgia runoff races on Jan. 5. Logically, wouldn’t these results be questionable, too, if there were issues about the Trump-Biden numbers?

Just as many federal, state and local Republican legislators have done, Meuser has tied his coattails to Trump, and when the president says “Jump!” they say “How high?”

They cannot even bring themselves to utter the phrase “president-elect” when it comes to Biden. Despite the obvious, just a handful of Republicans have acknowledged Biden’s status.

Republican officials across the country parroted Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen, and, in the process, hoped that their loyalty will pay rich dividends even when he is out of office.

To his credit, Meuser insisted that “there will be a smooth transition of power to the next administration,” although he has not referred to Biden as the legitimate winner of this year’s presidential election.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com