To the bitter end

摘要

"STOP THE STEAL" has become the an-them of outraged Republicans who believe President Donald Trump's claims that Democrats stole his re-election by committing massive voter fraud. It is the hashtag they rally around online and the slogan they chant when they throng in the streets, as they did on November 14th in Washington, DC, earning a laudatory drive-by from the presidential motorcade. But this is not the first time surrogates of Mr Trump have deployed it. Roger Stone, a former adviser to the president who recently had his prison sentence for several convictions commuted, actually founded a group by that name in April 2016-then to expose Senator Ted Cruz's purported plot to steal the Republican nomination. Similar pre-emptive claims of voter fraud were made before the general-election contest with Hillary Clinton in 2016. Now that Mr Trump has actually lost, the slogan has finally been deployed in earnest.