Anyone who’d been watching the White House chimney, waiting for their marching orders via a Vatican-like signal, surely saw one Friday morning when Fox Business Channel’s Maria Bartiromo interviewed White House trade adviser Peter Navarro.

“We’re moving forward here at the White House under the assumption there will be a second Trump term,” said Navarro in response to a question about a Joe Biden presidency. “I think it’s really important, before people’s heads explode here, to understand that what we seek here is verifiable ballots, certifiable ballots, and an investigation into what are growing numbers of allegations of fraud under signed affidavits by witnesses.”

“And my own view,” Navarro continued, “looking at this election, we have what appears in some sense to be an immaculate deception. … Clearly the president won this election, was leading on Election Day, and then after Election Day, somehow, in these key battleground states, they got just enough votes to catch up to the president. … So I think what’s important here, is that this is a country of laws and rules. We have a very clear set of election laws, and what we need to do is go through the process. … So until we do that, our assumption is a second Trump term.”

Navarro is a longtime Democrat, but he clearly has some steel in his spine. And his point about an immaculate deception is worth exploring, because the idea that Donald Trump lost a fair election to Scranton Joe Biden still beggars the imagination.

As we’ve noted before, Biden is an uninspiring, gaffe-prone, 77-year-old career politician who couldn’t draw, er, maggots to a month-old mutton chop. And yet he’s racked up a lot more population-adjusted votes than any presidential candidate in modern history, including that young, dynamic Barack Obama during his once-in-a-lifetime 2008 campaign.

We also noted the work of Trump senior campaign adviser Steve Cortes, who put together a brief, plain-as-day statistical case for fraud — a case that includes turnout, Biden’s performance versus Obama’s, thousands of odd Biden-only ballots, and the lack of mail-in vote vetting in a certain swing state.

Yeah, we know: Mail-in ballots were the fraud we saw coming. The fraud that no less a lefty than Jimmy Carter warned us about. But still.

J.B. Shurk at The Federalist has pulled together another strong circumstantial argument, this one based on five highly reliable historical trends.

“If I told you an incumbent president had 52 percent approval on Election Day,” he writes, “and ended up winning 10 million more votes than during his first election, would you predict victory? What if 56 percent of voters felt they were better off since the president had entered office? What if you knew that the incumbent had a nearly 30 percent enthusiasm edge over his opponent, or that when asked for whom they thought their neighbors were voting, nearly 10 percent more Americans expected the president to be re-elected than to lose?”

Shurk goes on to explore each of these five factors in greater detail. For example, he notes that Trump got nearly 10 million more votes this time than he did in 2016 and still lost. Needless to say, that’s unprecedented. For comparison, Obama bled 3.5 million voters between 2008 and 2012 but still won reelection.

“Trump won a greater share of minority votes than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960,” Shurk writes, “and brought more Democrats over to his side than in 2016. More than nine in 10 evangelical Christians voted to re-elect the president. For Trump to expand his coalition of voters so substantially and still lose is historic.”

You’re tellin’ us.

Fifty-six percent of us believe we’re better off now than when Donald Trump took office, and he still lost? To put this in perspective, Obama, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush all won reelection with a “better off” number around 45%.

Then there’s that enthusiasm gap, which was actually more of an enthusiasm gorge. Pollsters consistently pegged it between 15% and 30%. And, Shurk notes, “Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll, told the New York Post in mid-October that enthusiasm for Trump ‘is historically high,’ while ‘Biden’s enthusiasm level is historically low.’”

But, yeah, Biden beat Trump by five million votes.

There’s more — plenty more — but you get the idea. Something stinks.