Across the country, exclusively in cities controlled by Democrats, there have been “spontaneous” protests by the usual suspects “concerned” that the winner of Tuesday’s election doesn’t “represent” them as president.

And though the numbers at these protests don’t appear to be overly large, the intensity of them appears to make up some of the difference. In Seattle, violence was in the air both in the rhetoric of the speakers practicing street theater and in the literal sense, as four people were shot. In Chicago, a man was beaten and his car stolen for having manifested himself as a Donald Trump supporter. In New York, street theater turned threatening as hundreds surrounded Trump’s home at Trump Tower — more than a dozen arrested. Some 40 fires were started and three police officers were injured from Molotov Cocktail-hurling thugs in Oakland. Los Angeles police arrested 28 people attempting to block an interstate highway. Even the Hard-Left local government of Portland, Oregon termed the protests a riot after the orgy of property destruction unleashed there.

And in New Orleans, several dozen children from local colleges staged a tantrum in which bank windows were broken and businesses and landmarks defaced with profane graffiti. In the presence of local police. None were arrested.

Interestingly, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, who has gone out of his way to incite racial animus by attempting to bulldoze city landmarks dating from the city’s post-Confederate era — so much so that the Talibanesque campaign of historical defacement extended to a debate over bulldozing the iconic statue of Andrew Jackson featured in the square bearing his name — and who last year condemned Trump as the equal of David Duke, responded to Trump’s election by demanding that the president-elect begin to “reconcile” with various Democrat constituency groups (women, blacks, Muslims, Hispanics) and repent of his “divisive” rhetoric.

Landrieu then had his police sit by and do nothing as members of those constituency groups, and others, rampaged through his city destroying property.

That’s a pattern that has repeated itself across the country — in deep blue cities, the local pols demand Trump “reconcile” with the people he offended amid the campaign, and shortly after the Social Justice mob appears to bring chaos to the streets and Astroturf their way onto the local and national news to create the appearance of civil disorder. The pattern even includes perpetrating hoaxes to slander Trump supporters as violent racists.

And that disorder is clearly aimed at cowing Trump into “reconciliation” — as defined by those he is to reconcile with.

We know it’s Astroturf, not just because these protests and near-riots always are. The protesters in Austin came off buses, as they did in other cities.

It’s all the Left has in their arsenal. The election is over and the voters repudiated them nearly everywhere they could. It wasn’t just Hillary Clinton’s loss — the Democrats couldn’t take the House or Senate, they now control only 16 governorships and 12 state legislatures. Their party is at a low point of political power such as they’ve not seen since 1928, the finale of the Calvin Coolidge administration.

Democrats no longer have the power to win real arguments in America, because they’ve allowed a cadre of totalitarians and crybullies to seize control of their intellectual centers. All they have left is intimidation, and thus we now have a brand-new manifestation of the Occupy gang angry at Trump’s election and transported to TV-friendly locales for street theater. On the Occupy Wall Street Facebook page, they’re threatening a general strike during the Trump inauguration; this would be a considerably more frightening prospect if any of them had jobs.

It’s a prestige, from the old French definition of the word. It’s an illusion from a parlor trick. It isn’t real. And neither Trump nor any other Republican should give it credit.

In fact, it’s long past time to call these rats out for their ruse. It’s time for Trump supporters, and particularly Republican governors in states where Democrat hack mayors are allowing this drama to play out, to demand those mayors crack down on the illegality in their streets. And if it doesn’t cease then, it’s time for the National Guard to put a stop to the show.

Not to mention whatever bad behavior is perpetrated on America’s streets ought to be laid at the feet of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and it ought to be loudly demanded that they denounce both the violence and the violent rhetoric those people in the streets have put on display.

It’s time to point out the ruse, and the people putting it on, and to put an end to it.

And for Trump, it’s an opportunity to show the public, and particularly many on his side who may have been reticent to support him out of a lack of faith in his conservative pedigree, that he’s what so many Republicans have been begging for by rejecting this “reconciliation” on the terms in which it’s been presented by the Landrieus of the world.

Trump said in his victory speech that he plans to be the president of all Americans, even those who didn’t vote for him. That is sufficient outreach, particularly as it relates to rock-hurling hooligans in the streets with “F**k Trump” signs printed by some shady “activist” group drawing funding from George Soros.

Here’s what’s important to remember — Republican perceptions of politics, and Democrat perceptions as well, are colored by the fact that since 1988 the only Republicans in the White House have been Bushes. And in the case of both father and son, hardball negotiation with Democrats simply wasn’t on the menu where domestic policy is concerned.

Trump is most certainly not a Bush, but this post-election ruse is a gamble that because he’s new to elected office and his political background is as a moderate New York Democrat he’ll cave like one with a little bit of pressure. He has an opportunity to disabuse the Dems of that notion by sticking to his guns on the agenda he outlined in his October Gettysburg speech, or at least most of it, and by nominating the most aggressive choice possible for the open Supreme Court vacancy.

Perhaps the best fit for such a role is Utah Supreme Court justice Thomas Rex Lee, a former clerk for Clarence Thomas, a Mormon law professor at BYU, and the brother of Utah senator Mike Lee. The Democrats will absolutely lose their minds over Lee as the nominee, and that’s why Trump should nominate him. And Trump should hold Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s feet to the fire that the latter must negotiate past a Democrat filibuster, even if it means unfurling the “nuclear option” McConnell’s Democrat predecessor Harry Reid used in 2013 to pack the D.C. Circuit Court with leftist activists.

And while it’s unquestionably true that to repeal Obamacare would be akin to defusing a bomb, Trump must do it immediately anyway, and with extreme prejudice. The skyrocketing premiums of that failed experiment in half-assed socialized medicine are robbing Americans of their disposable income, and worse, and represent a real threat to the nation’s economic solvency — it can’t be killed quickly enough whether a replacement is ready or not. It’s inconceivable that a free market in health care wouldn’t perform better than this.

And of course, Trump has said he’d banish a large swath of Obama’s executive orders as soon as he takes office. It’s an easy bet he’ll follow through on that promise; doing so will deeply ingratiate him to his supporters and many skeptics, but the Left will likely reprise this week’s theater at every turn in response.

Exercising the immense power of the office granted to him by the American people, in concert with a unified Republican government in the House and Senate, to drive through an aggressive agenda of change will give Trump legitimacy not only as the change agent he advertised himself to be, but reset the model of Republican leadership and lift the morale of what had been a waning conservative movement prior to Tuesday. Nothing will unify the Republican Party like success in making policy, and Trump has it within his grasp to accomplish just that in a very short time.

Trump should welcome the idea of reconciliation with the Left. He should demand it on his terms, not theirs. And those terms hardly include hundreds of rent-a-mob rioters chanting obscenities and destroying property in Democrat-run cities.