EDITORIAL: Trump remains obsessed with fruitless battles

It’s no secret that Donald Trump’s mouth — and thumbs — often get ahead of his intellectual deliberations. But the idea that Twitter’s Hunter Biden fiasco should be enough to throw out the 2020 presidential election results is about as goofy as it gets.

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump took to his personal social media company, Truth Social, to rant about internal Twitter documents showing how the platform intentionally suppressed information unfavorable to Joe Biden’s son Hunter in the weeks before the 2020 election. The former president implied that he would still be in the Oval Office if the story had been allowed to circulate.

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he wrote.

The backlash was immediate — and appropriate.

Mr. Trump responded in typical fashion: by digging deeper. “The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution,” he wrote on Monday. “This is simply more DISINFORMATION &LIES, just like RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, and all of their other HOAXES &SCAMS.” Mr. Trump said he simply meant that “steps must be immediately taken to RIGHT THE WRONG.”

Mr. Trump may want to look at his original post. Taken literally, he did indeed call for the “termination” of requirements “found in the Constitution.” Even if he meant to confine this to the rules governing national elections, it is still an eye-opening statement, to say the least.

The Constitution doesn’t allow for mulligans in presidential elections. In addition, federal judges throughout the country — doing their constitutional duties — considered the Trump camp’s claims of election shenanigans in dozens of cases and came to the virtually unanimous conclusion that they were without merit. That’s the Constitution at work.

There’s no way to know, of course, whether the Hunter Biden laptop story might have pushed a few voters in swing states into Mr. Trump’s camp. But that’s irrelevant two years later.

Mr. Trump recently announced that he would again seek the Republican presidential nomination. It’s unlikely that he’ll change his stripes, so expect a barrage of social media posts in the coming months. Rather than remain mired in 2020, however, and agitating about terminating the Constitution, Mr. Trump’s campaign might be better served by offering a positive vision for the nation moving forward. Otherwise, he risks suffering the fate met by many of his hand-picked candidates in the recent midterm elections.