As Orwell memorably put it, sometimes the “restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” In that spirit, The Scrapbook will reiterate to our liberal friends: Donald Trump is going to be president of the United States. We don’t have high hopes that they’re listening to us, however. Consider the sequence of events since November 8.

First, Democrats pushed futile recount efforts in three states in the hopes, apparently, of some kind of divine intervention. The effort was spearheaded by the Green party, but Hillary Clinton aides participated in the recount in Wisconsin and were quietly supportive otherwise. Trump actually gained votes in Wisconsin, the one state where a recount was completed. The only thing notable about the Michigan and Pennsylvania recounts was that we learned 37 percent of Detroit’s precincts counted more ballots than the number of voters reported by poll workers.