Mulvaney is an extraordinary hack but for much of the Trump era his supporters really did accept a vast gulf between the president's promises and what actually happened in the real world. https://twitter.com/MeetThePress/status/1348274523641151488

It's interesting to think about what has made the election-fraud narrative different from the Wall, the joke of infrastructure week, the replacement for Obamacare that was always two weeks away ... to say nothing of the QAnon narrative and its constantly-unfulfilled promises.

As @matthewwalther wrote, part of the appeal of the Q story was precisely that it claimed that Trump was secretly winning amazing victories even as his official promises were so often unfulfilled:
https://theweek.com/articles/915855/how-social-conservatives-traded-causes-clichs?fbclid=IwAR24w1M5eBXitC6FKKJs2GeSh5Ku8Pe73Vo1kDDXNC-6wiNpN9bn3v8hSH8

Maybe this was all destined to end once Trump left office -- a hard deadline that couldn't be blustered away or taken seriously but not literally. But I think the narrative of secret victory could have adapted even to defeat and exile (indeed, I still expect it to do so).

The difference was that while all his handlers and enablers thought Trump's BS about proving voter fraud was just the latest version of his "wait two weeks for policy X" bluster, Trump himself couldn't let go of it the way he'd let go of other promises and cons.

And somehow Trump's persistence plus the scale of fraud belief plus enablement from GOPers who thought they were still in "wait two weeks" territory created a kind of brain-meld between Q, Trump and a swathe of the right (e.g. @ericmetaxas) that hadn't fully happened before.

In that sense something really did seem different after the election: Not in Trump's character or temperament, but in the extent to which he and many supporters wanted to reify their symbolic narratives, which required first Q-world logic and then, well, what happened in DC.