After four interminable years of feeling like turkeys who’d been stuffed full with Donald Trump—his voice in our ears, his tweets waking us, his erratic moods and feuds dominating all that passed as political news—we find ourselves now in this strange interregnum. Having spent years training ourselves to ignore that which threatened to consume us, we are faced with the fact that even his vanquished ghost will not leave. Yes, Donald Trump has lost the election (hasty reframe: Joe Biden has won the election!) No, there is nothing Rudy Giuliani can do to change that outcome in the courts (hasty reframe: The courts have batted down almost every single lawsuit Rudy has filed!). And yes, in a few short weeks we will mercifully never, ever, need to have this man occupy all of this space in our brains again.

But for now, how much space in our brains should he continue to take up? How do we deal with an artlessly attempted coup that is formidable yet somehow not literal? Can we ignore him into oblivion—a move that hasn’t worked yet over the course of five years? How are we back to the same debate about whether this is a catastrophe for democracy or a nothing? And does the power to make that decision rest with us in the first place?

After all, this long national nightmare is meant to be over. Right? Right? So why is it still playing, in its endless variations, on a loop? For starters, we have spent the past four years in an abusive relationship with this man, and that doesn’t simply end. One hesitates to proffer the analogy, but as his niece, Mary Trump, has observed, the most dangerous time in any abusive relationship comes when the victim attempts to leave. One of the reasons it is not quite possible to exhale, more than two weeks after the election has ended, is because Donald Trump refuses to concede. That’s his problem. But in the meantime, do we really have to watch him rage and tweet, bouncing off the walls of the White House in a fury, and expending whatever capital that remains to him playing with the troops, and firing everyone who brings a lick of stability to the current, rather perilous situation, and working fiendishly to disadvantage Biden’s transition team? Having lost in the courts, his new work evidently lies in emboldening obscure local election boards to nullify their voting tallies, calling them on the phone to exert pressure, inviting them to the White House. That means that even postelection we are still stress monkeys. He still has eight weeks remaining in which to break things and burn things down.

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