President Trump’s refusal to accept the presidential election results is being reinforced in pockets of denial nationwide, but the anger continues to fall short of a coherent resistance movement that would threaten to overturn the vote.

Four years ago, Hillary Clinton had already conceded the race, even though her numbers in battleground states were closer to where Trump is to Biden today.

But Trump has given every indication that he won’t accept the result in 2020 as fair.

Like any Banana Republic dictator, he has also has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

It’s really quite a moment for our Republic.

Elected Republicans and GOP voters aren’t backing down either.

They’ve called for the continuation of efforts to challenge the results, which in Pennsylvania give President-elect Joe Biden a roughly 45,000-vote margin of victory.

That’s a bigger majority than Trump had when he carried the state four years ago.

Small clusters of Trump supporters gathered on several Philadelphia street corners Sunday to condemn a vote-counting process in which the president lost an early lead to Biden over several agonizing days.

No evidence of improper counting procedures or any type of voter fraud has been presented.

“If he won and you want to go communist, knock yourself out,” said Joe Mullica, 56, a truck driver who grew up in south Philadelphia and demonstrated with a handful of others. “But when you consider Trump increased the Black vote, the Hispanic vote and yet you’re gonna tell me Biden won more than Obama? Hello? That don’t send up red flags?”

The flashes of defiance on the streets reflected the larger one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where Trump continued to insist, without evidence, that Biden and the Democratic Party stole the election.

At five days, the lag between Election Day, on Nov. 3, and a result was not close to the longest in U.S. history.

But the delay did represent perhaps the most perplexing one, based less on proof than petulance.

By the end of Sunday, all but four states had been called, leaving Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), with nine more than the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency.

But Trump allies have kept up questions primarily about the counts in Arizona (called for Biden by JimHeath.TV, the AP and Fox News), Georgia and in Pennsylvania.

There appeared this weekend to be no centralized effort — at the White House or elsewhere — to bring together scattered Republican protests in an effort to reverse the results in Trump’s favor.

On a conference call with allies Saturday, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said the campaign may be “propping up” rallies, protests and other events in upcoming weeks.

Some Republicans said Sunday that Trump has a case to make in some close-run states and showcase an issue — voter fraud — that the party has attempted to elevate into a national issue for several election cycles.

There has been little proof of its existence.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) urged Trump to refuse to concede the election, calling it “contested” on Fox News Sunday.

Kris Kobach, a former Kansas secretary of state who lost two statewide races on the issue, said: “There’s very much a live legal controversy in multiple states.”

He pointed to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada, where Republicans have alleged that more than 3,000 voters who do not live in the state cast their ballots there.

“If anything, this latest election has once again raised the profile of the issue,” Kobach said. “It’s a perennial problem.”

Most of the Republican legal efforts have been small-scale and thrown out by judges.

In Nevada, a federal judge rejected Republicans’ request to intervene in ballot counting in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas.

Judges in Georgia and Michigan quickly dismissed Trump campaign lawsuits last week.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. ordered Pennsylvania counties to comply with state guidance to keep late-arriving ballots separate, but did not direct officials to stop counting ballots as Republicans requested.

Hundreds of Trump supporters had descended upon the steps of the Minnesota Capitol in St. Paul and later in front of the governor’s mansion last week, waving Trump flags and bearing signs alleging widespread voter fraud, despite there being evidence of none.

On Thursday night, Jennifer Carnahan, the chairman of the Minnesota GOP, held a private Zoom call with party activists where she said Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel had asked her to rally other Republicans to back the president’s claims of voter fraud.

She cited “the looseness of the election laws,” among other issues.

Republican officials, including McDaniel, made unsubstantiated allegations that ballots were missing in Rochester Hills, Mich — something the City Clerk Tina Barton said was a egregious misrepresentation of a technical error that was quickly fixed.

In Georgia, which has yet to be called for either candidate, Democrats have greeted Republican claims that they would be filing lawsuits in a dozen counties with skepticism, even as a recount is expected to proceed.

On Thursday, a judge in Chatham County dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign and the Georgia Republican Party claiming that Republican observers had seen a woman mix 50 ballots into a stack of uncounted absentee ballots.

In Pennsylvania, state Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman (R), who has been critical of election officials and the state’s Democratic governor, described a variety of concerns.

No evidence of voter fraud has surfaced.

Bill Whalen, a political analyst at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, compared a legal challenge based on what he has seen and heard so far to the band-already-on-the-field kickoff return that won the game for the University of California at Berkeley over Stanford in 1982.

“It would be a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence of events — in other words, Trump is going to lose,” Whalen said. “The president will run out of legal options and the election will go to Joe Biden. Eventually, there will be a Barry Goldwater moment.”

Whalen was referring to a meeting in 1974 when President Richard Nixon was trying to stave off impeachment over the fallout from the Watergate break-in.

Goldwater, a leading Republican senator from Arizona, told him he did not have support in the chamber to save his presidency.

Whalen said Trump will probably receive the same message regarding support within his party.

“Until then, Biden will begin making daily policy announcements and appointments,” Whalen said, “and we will forget all about this.”

“The 2000 election stretched into mid-December before it was conceded,” Whalen continued. “And today, the republic still stands. The only damage done by these kinds of challenges is in the short term, not the long term.”

What this could really be about is Trump’s self preservation moving forward.

He has millions of dollars in loans coming due in the next four years, and losing the presidency won’t help him in ongoing court cases.

If he thinks his millions of followers will sacrifice democracy for him, he just may try it.