Since election day, Donald Trump has explained his popular vote loss to Hillary Clinton by claiming that millions of people committed voter fraud and cast their ballots illegally.

This is a lie, but it's what the Nazis called a "big lie" - a lie you repeat enough times that people start believing it's true.

Just one guffaw - that's all it took for Desiree Fairooz to go from a children's librarian and activist to someone facing serious jail time.

I'm not kidding here.

Back in January, Fairooz was arrested and removed from a Senate hearing after laughing at someone who said Jeff Sessions would treat all Americans equally.

In the American media, the 2017 French presidential election has been portrayed as a rehash of the 2016 US presidential election, with far-right populist Marine Le Pen playing the role of Donald Trump and her opponent - centrist Emmanuel Macron - standing in for Hillary Clinton.

It is virtually impossible to read a newspaper or a blog analyzing the politics of America in 2017 without thinking "disaster." Since Donald Trump became president not just the United States, but the world, has become unstable and liberal democracies in general are under assault by antidemocratic authoritarian forces.