Despite the clear math showing that Joe Biden has won the election, President Donald Trump has refused to concede. He has directed his legal team to keep on fighting to try to overturn the results of the election, including in a new 105-page federal-court filing in Pennsylvania. These legal maneuvers are unlikely to pay off in the form of a second term for Trump; he would need the equivalent of three consecutive Hail Mary passes to stay in office.

But what Trump and his legal team are doing can nevertheless cause real harm to the country going forward, should millions of people believe Trump’s false statements that Biden won the election through fraud. It is this near certainty, and not the long-shot possibility of Trump staying in office, that is reason for grave concern.

The state of play can be described as follows: Biden appears very likely to win 306 Electoral College votes, 36 more than he needs for the presidency. This is a comfortable lead. Recounts in even the closest states, where the candidates are 10,000 to 20,000 votes apart, are extremely unlikely to change the election results; the most recent Wisconsin recount, in 2016, shifted the result by 571 votes. And nothing in those closest states indicates the kind of systemic failure that could lead to a more dramatic reversal.

The lawsuits filed in Pennsylvania and elsewhere are highly unlikely to go anywhere. The most recent complaint filed in federal court in Pennsylvania amounts to virtually nothing. Its core idea, that the different procedures for voting by mail and voting in person constitute an equal-protection violation, is ludicrous.

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We can keep going down these rabbit holes, and though surely there are some very dark possibilities, none of them is likely. Republicans know this, and they are perhaps just “humoring” Trump by allowing him to believe that he has a path to victory.

This humoring has a tremendous downside. As Bill Kristol wrote, that we are having this discussion at all is itself concerning. And even though the election results do not appear to be in doubt, what Trump and his team are doing now is corrosive to democracy, which depends on the losers accepting results as legitimate. The danger, then, is less about whether Biden takes office in January and more about whether the American people will keep believing that this is a country that can settle its disagreements peacefully and through a legal process.