Why is it that the only promises Donald Trump ever seems to keep are the ones he shouldn't have made in the first place? The president has long signaled that he would throw the election into chaos by baselessly crying fraud over mail-in ballots — and sure enough, he's doing exactly that. He also has hinted he would refuse to concede should he end up losing, so America may yet have that unprecedented crisis to look forward to.

As of midday Thursday, the election had not yet yielded a winner. But it has already confirmed, even more clearly than the events of the past four years, that Trump is by far the most democracy-averse president ever to occupy the office. His post-election antics are nothing less than un-American. GOP leaders have an obligation to challenge them.

With record mail-in votes being counted in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and elsewhere, Democrat Joe Biden was leading the Electoral College count. It appeared likely (though by no means certain) that Trump would soon be facing the prospect of going down in history as a one-term president.

To the surprise of no one, that prospect proved too much for Trump's famously thin skin. The president who has, again and again, put his own interests above those of the nation hit a new low in a televised speech to supporters early Wednesday. He falsely aired conspiracy theories about the vote and asserted victory — a truly bizarre claim, given that Trump was at that point significantly trailing Biden in the race to garner the requisite 270 electoral votes. In addition to a speech so full of lies that news anchors had to correct it in real time, Trump has lashed out online with a torrent of falsehoods so egregious that Twitter and Facebook have had to post multiple warning labels correcting them.

Trump's argument — that the election was being "stolen" by mail-in votes and that murky conspirators were suddenly "finding" additional ballots — wasn't a twisting of facts but a wholesale fabrication. Other than the record volume of mail-in votes, there has been nothing unusual about this process; vote-counting always proceeds long past Election Day and has been known to postpone public declaration of a winner. Trump's deranged claims to the contrary are typically shameless and potentially dangerous.

So far, the only apparent unrest caused by Trump's antics has been a few dozen supporters showing up at election offices where Trump was ahead, chanting "Stop the count" — neatly summarizing Trump's attitude about who calls the vote.

Whatever the outcome of the election, Trump has committed lasting damage to the nation's electoral tradition. Republican leaders, having contributed to that damage by enabling his behavior, must renounce Trump's undermining of democracy and reaffirm their commitment to the validity of the ballot.

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