Donald Trump’s would-be coup has ended with a feeble surrender, as the outgoing ruler tacitly conceded that the transition to a Joe Biden presidency could begin. Of course, it’s unlikely that Trump ever had serious plans for squatting unlawfully in the White House. Not for the first time, his bark proved to be much worse than his bite.

False allegations of electoral fraud in the run-up to the presidential election were a good way for Trump to rally his base and legitimize voter suppression efforts. Once it became clear that Joe Biden had bested him anyway, the idle claims of fraud supplied Trump with an excuse for failure, and a way to generate ongoing cycles of paranoid entitlement among conservative voters — a useful rallying cry for 2022, perhaps.

However, this shambolic conclusion to a farcical presidency still contains some important lessons. Democratic Party supporters have been given a small taste of what things are like for left-wing movements in Latin America at any given moment. Time and again, we’ve seen popular left-wing governments south of the Rio Grande stigmatized by their conservative opponents with bogus claims of electoral fraud, in order to justify violent protests — and, in some cases, an outright coup.