Donald Trump is no stranger to comically stupid scandals.

He was impeached for an open attempt to illegally leverage congressionally approved military aid so a newly elected Ukrainian president would investigate rival Joe Biden and announce it on television. Stupid Watergate , HBOs John Oliver called it.

Its no surprise, then, that Trumps blatant and racist effort to steal an election he lost by at least 58 electoral votes (pending the outcome of the recount in Georgia, where Biden leads by over 12,000 votes) and 5.8 million popular votes and counting is also really, really stupid.

First, Trump telegraphed the entire scheme to steal the election ahead of time, like a Bond villain explaining his entire plot, thus exposing the true purpose of his ensuing frivolous lawsuits. If it looked like he would lose, he planned to claim that late-counted absentee ballots were fraudulent and illegal and to file lawsuits to stop the certification of results in states where he trailed. The hope then was that Republican-controlled legislatures or governors would just hand him their states electoral votes. Whether or not this was legal didnt seem to matter.

Those lawsuits claiming election and voter fraud have almost all been laughed out of court in embarrassing fashion after Trumps own lawyers admitted they had no evidence of said fraud. Republican state lawmakers all said they wouldnt be switching electoral votes to Trump. Law firms then dropped Trump as pressure mounted for them not to help him undermine democracy, which left former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to step in as counsel.

Giuliani delivered a performance worthy of the bumbling Simpsons lawyer Lionel Hutz in which he lied about his standing with the District of Columbia Bar, rambled about the long-dead Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, demonstrated an incapacity to understand basic legal practices and could not properly define the word opacity.

Im not sure what opacity means, Giuliani said. It probably means you can see.

It means you cant, Judge Matthew Brann corrected the former prosecutor.

Its easy to laugh at a former mayor who was recently caught with his hand down his pants in a Borat movie be-clowning himself in court.

But just because this is all incredibly dumb and has no chance of successfully overturning Bidens win doesnt mean its not incredibly dangerous. The entire scheme involves the delegitimization and disenfranchisement of voters in predominantly Black municipalities.

It undermines his supporters faith in democracy. And it could be used in years to come to justify unnecessary and damaging voting restrictions that would disproportionately affect Black voters.