monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

An election is supposed to be a reality check. It promises the finality of decision, in which the back-and-forth of political argument gives way to the undeniability of a particular outcome on a particular day.

One factor is the increasingly immersive power of ideological narratives and virtual realities. If you can react to an election loss by retreating immediately into a storyscape where the outcome was a cheat, carried about by means of voter fraud or Russian interference, then the decisiveness of any given outcome will inevitably diminish.

Another factor is the interaction of political polarization with America’s two-party system and constitutional design. A country with two parties that are increasingly ideologically consolidated, and a narrowing band of swing voters in between, will produce fewer landslides and more nail-biters, and more swings back and forth from election to election, than a country with looser and more fluid coalitions. If that country’s electoral system also allows candidates to win the state’s highest office with a minority of the popular vote, then under polarized conditions this scenario will become more commonplace, decoupling the official decision of the election from the apparent preferences of the voting majority.

From a systemic perspective, from the point of view of America’s potential governability, even those of us who would oppose much about a Biden presidency could draw something hopeful from the seeming possibility — as of 24 hours ago — of a landslide Democratic win. That would mean that the system can still deliver clear decisions, even if only for one cycle, and it would create incentives for whatever follows Trump in the Republican Party to seek a similarly decisive victory in its turn.

Instead at the moment we seem headed toward the indecision of another too-close-to-call and potentially litigated endgame, with razor-thin margins no matter which man wins. Which implies that even under what seemed like favorable conditions for a decisive outcome, the evolving ways we’re polarized — by age, geography, sex, class and faith — are still the more powerful forces, dragging us ever back toward stalemate.

It’s one more sign, as if we needed more, that our system’s method of uniting power with legitimacy is slowly losing both.

The president's pledge to challenge states still counting votes, and the president's false claim that he'd already won the election ... is something, the USA and other democracies condemn if done in countries governed by autocrats or dictators.
The USA formerly condemned it should read.

then use that unrest to give the SC a supposed rationale to act and close down vote counting.

Trump understands he might well lose. In fact, he surely knows he will almost certainly lose if those votes are counted.

And he knows far better than any of us how endangered he will become when he loses the protections inherent in holding the presidency.