CNN  — 

When you think of conservatism in America, you think of the National Review. Founded in the mid-1950s by William F. Buckley Jr., the publication has been a bulwark of conservative thought for almost the entirety of one Donald J. Trump’s life.

Which is why an editorial by the editors of NR that was published Monday morning is worth paying attention to.

Headlined “Trump’s Disgraceful Endgame,” it amounts to an absolute takedown of the President’s fanciful and false claims that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him.

Here’s the key bit (bolding is mine):

“There are legitimate issues to consider after the 2020 vote about the security of mail-in ballots and the process of counting votes (some jurisdictions, bizarrely, take weeks to complete their initial count), but make no mistake: The chief driver of the post-election contention of the past several weeks is the petulant refusal of one man to accept the verdict of the American people.”

This is 100% accurate. What Trump has been tweeting – and, on Sunday, talking about with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo – about alleged election violations has been debunked in full. He is peddling falsehoods solely because he can’t accept losing. 

And as the National Review editorial argues, there are real and dangerous consequences to this deluge of dishonesty.

“Flawed and dishonest assertions like this pollute the public discourse and mislead good people who make the mistake of believing things said by the president of the United States,” they write.

Make no mistake: This will change nothing about Trump’s ongoing attempts to muddy the waters about who won the election. (Spoiler alert: Joe Biden did!)

But one hopes that Republican elected officials – the vast majority of whom have stayed silent or said that Trump has every right to continue his legal challenges despite their total lack of merit – will read the National Review piece and reconsider the real world impact of what the President is doing.

If the last four years are any indication, though, probably not.

The Point: Words matter. Especially when uttered by the President of the United States.