Even his admirers—and I have to declare myself to be among them—must admit that Donald John Trump has one or two things in common with Charles Foster Kane. So when the former announced on election night, just as the vote appeared to turn against him in key states, that he had been the victim of fraud, one was inevitably reminded of the hero of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane who, on the night before an election that he was about to lose, prepared two different banner headlines for the newspaper he owned: “Kane Elected!” in case he won and “Fraud at Polls!” in case he lost. In other words, to use what I was once told was Twitter shorthand, “Mandy Rice-Davies applies”: “He would [say that], wouldn’t he?”

Yes, one can readily imagine that calling foul was automatic with this president. It’s one of the reasons why his many detractors not only disapprove of him but actively hate him, though like Nancy Pelosi they are usually reluctant to admit it. That he might well have cried fraud even after losing the most immaculately clean election there has ever been seems all too plausible. But readers will not need reminding that this does not mean that what happened on November 3 was the most immaculately clean election there has ever been—or that there was no “Fraud at Polls!” that caused him to lose it.

For Mandy Rice-Davies applies to the media and the Democrats as well. What else