TRUMP WANTS A CRACKPOT IMPEACHMENT DEFENSE -- AND REALLY, WHY SHOULDN'T HE HAVE ONE?

With his second Senate impeachment trial about to begin, Donald Trump has no legal team, CNN reports.

Former President Donald Trump's five impeachment defense attorneys have left a little more than a week before his trial is set to begin, according to people familiar with the case, amid a disagreement over his legal strategy....

A person familiar with the departures told CNN that Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he's left office. Trump was not receptive to the discussions about how they should proceed in that regard.

In The New York Times, Maggie Haberman implies that the explanation for the lawyers' departures might not be that simple.

Mr. Trump had pushed for his defense team to focus on his baseless claim that the election was stolen from him, one person familiar with the situation said. A person close to Mr. Trump disputed that that was the case but acknowledged that there were differences in opinion about the defense strategy.

The CNN story suggests that even long-time Trump bootlickers want him to use the legality defense.

"The Democrats' efforts to impeach a president who has already left office is totally unconstitutional and so bad for our country. In fact, 45 Senators have already voted that it is unconstitutional. We have done much work, but have not made a final decision on our legal team, which will be made shortly," former Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller told CNN.

But Haberman tells us that Trump believes he knows better than the lawyers, and that the man who was expected to be Trump's lead lawyer, Butch Bowers, left at least in part because Trump didn't think he was ... um, sufficiently butch.

... Mr. Trump has insisted that the case is “simple” and has told advisers he could argue it himself and save the money on lawyers. (Aides contend he is not seriously contemplating doing so.)

The decision for Mr. Bowers to leave was “mutual,” another person familiar with the situation said, adding that Mr. Trump and Mr. Bowers had no chemistry, a quality the former president generally prizes in his relationships. Mr. Trump prefers lawyers who are eager to appear on television to say that he never did anything wrong; Mr. Bowers has been noticeably absent in the news media since his hiring was announced.

I can hear Trump now: This guy -- he's not a killer! I need killers defending me! I need Roy Cohn!

But it doesn't matter. House Democrats could find a tape of Trump personally planning the assault on the Capitol and all but a handful of Republicans would still vote to acquit.

Trump's strategy, as CNN describes it, is the correct one -- for Trump. It doesn't matter that it's based on a Big Lie -- it's a Big Lie that the majority of the GOP electorate believes. Why shouldn't Trump use the impeachment trial to relitigate the election one more time? What's the downside? He might lose one or two GOP senators in addition to the five who voted to proceed with the impeachment? So what? He'll still be acquitted. And there's no reason to assume that such a strategy will, in fact, lose him any additional senators. We don't even know for sure that all five of the Republicans who voted to proceed will vote to convict.

"I was robbed" is now a big part of Trump's brand. His image -- as someone who fought "the swamp" so effectively that a global conspiracy was needed to take him down -- requires him to insist that he didn't lose legitimately. And millions of Americans believe him.

If Trump wants to make a comeback in 2024, or wants to remain a kingmaker (or queenmaker), or even wants to continue to use politics as a grift, or hopes to summon another January 6 riot in the future to intimate prosecutors or litigants who want to bring him to trial, then he needs to keep saying he beat Joe Biden. Also, he believes it.

He'll be acquitted no matter what his defense is. So yes -- it's the right strategy, and while we'll probably laugh at the nutball lawyers he'll ultimately hire, they'll be doing the right thing for him.

TRUMP PASSES THE TORCH

This is more significant than you realize:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said Saturday that she spoke with former President Trump as she faces growing bipartisan criticism over past social media posts in which she expressed support for violence against Democrats....

I had a GREAT call with my all time favorite POTUS, President Trump!

I’m so grateful for his support and more importantly the people of this country are absolutely 100% loyal to him because he is 100% loyal to the people and America First.

Cont’d...

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) January 30, 2021

Josh Marshall is essentially correct:

Will take a bit for most to realize it. But with this call Trump has made Greene de facto leader of the House GOP caucus. She speaks for him and he supports her. So she is untouchable. Nominal leaders like McCarthy will fall in line and take her lead because they answer to Trump.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 30, 2021

Trump might not have made Greene the effective head of the House Republican caucus, but he's now made it explicit that if you cross her, you cross him.

It should have already been clear to Greene's fellow Republicans that she's a hero to Trump's base, and that attacking her marks you as a RINO worthy of defeat, if not death by hanging. But this officially puts her under the protection of the Godfather -- hurt her and he'll make you pay.

The time to stop Greene was before she made it to the general election, which she was guaranteed to win because of the extremely Republican nature of her district. But important Republicans not only failed to stop her, they encouraged her candidacy and urged her to run in this very red district, even though she didn't live there.

... Greene’s widely reported comments about the radical ideology of QAnon and other matters had not stopped a coterie of top Republicans from urging her to run for the seat representing a deeply conservative district in north Georgia, and then issuing fervent endorsements.

Greene was “exactly the kind of fighter needed in Washington to stand with me against the radical left,” declared Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a founding member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Debbie Meadows, who ran an influential political action committee and whose husband, Mark Meadows, became Trump’s chief of staff, gushed, “We cannot wait to welcome her to Congress.”

... As Greene’s [online] videos received wider viewership, she announced that she was considering a run for Congress in the district where she lived near Atlanta.

That prompted a number of reports in the summer of 2019 about her videos. She was initially described in the local media as a long shot and was widely written off. But when then-Rep. Tom Graves retired from a heavily Republican district in north Georgia, Greene said she was urged by top Republicans in Washington to switch to that race.

Greene said at a GOP breakfast that “I started getting phone calls from the most conservative members in the House Freedom Caucus. Debbie Meadows — Mark Meadows’ wife — Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Biggs (R-Ariz.) is chairman of the Freedom Caucus.

At the time, Mark Meadows was preparing to resign his seat as a North Carolina member of the House to become Trump’s chief of staff, and Debbie Meadows would become executive director of Right Women, a political action committee devoted to electing women who agree to become members of the House Freedom Caucus. The website of Right Women said that it has a “robust vetting process,” suggesting it would have been aware of the reporting about Greene’s comments....

“Right Women is enthusiastic in our support of Marjorie Greene, and we are thrilled that she will advance to the runoff in August,” Debbie Meadows said in a news release in June 2020. “Marjorie is committed to standing up for economic freedom and will help advance President Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda.”

For a little-known first-time candidate with a dodgy past, Greene attracted a fair amount of out-of-state billionaire cash, as The Guardian reported in August.

Greene ... received donations from major Republican donors, including Tatnall Hillman, who was described by Colorado Politics as “a secretive Aspen billionaire who annually makes multi-million contributions to Republican candidates”; Lenore Broughton, who was described by Vermont paper Seven Days as “a Burlington heiress with a history of funding conservative causes”, and Cherna Moskowitz, the head of the Irving Moskowitz Foundation and chair of the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism.

Cherna Moskowitz is the widow of Irving Moskowitz, a Florida-based gambling magnate reportedly worth $8 billion; the Moskowitzes' foundation funds the Israeli settler movement. (Yes, a prominent Zionist gave money to the Soros-slandering Greene, now best known for her "Jewish space laser" theory -- but we see philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism living comfortably together all over the right, particularly in Trump's orbit.)

In any case, Greene is set for life, unless she aims too high. I can imagine her concluding that she should run against Brian Kemp for governor or Raphael Warnock for Senate in 2022. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll says that new senators Warnock and Jon Ossoff have solid support from Georgia voters now, as does President Biden, while Kemp is underwater and Trump even more so. But I bet she could win a primary, and in two years Biden's honeymoon will be long past. I hope it's a new day in Georgia, or at least in most of the state, but after Trump, I never want to bet that any Republican is too crazy to win an election.

THERE WAS DIRT ON MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE BEFORE SHE WAS ELECTED, BUT IT WAS THE WRONG DIRT

Erick Erickson has been positioning himself as a voice of reason lately -- he particularly wants it known that he opposed Donald Trump's efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election. He's also not a fan of fellow Georgian Marjorie Taylor Greene. In a new post at his Substack site, he says that he knew she was a problem for the Republican Party, and her election was a failure of the Georgia GOP political establishment.

I knew Marjorie Taylor Greene was QAnon and a 9/11 truther.

Today, I learn the congresswoman from Georgia ... believes the Jews have an orbital space laser that started wild fires in California to clear a path for a high speed rail system. Yes, she actually believes that....

Marjorie Taylor Greene also believes or believed that the Newtown, CT and Parkland, FL school shootings were “false flag” operations, a favorite conspiracy of nuts online....

Greene ... got elected because no one had knowledge about her.... Her election is not a damning indictment on the people of Georgia, but on the political class.

I know because I am literally the only voice across the five media markets in her district, openly told listeners they’d regret voting for her, and never once had any of the opposition research shared with me.

Trust me, if I knew about the Jews in space, that would have made incredible radio during the primary. But I had no idea.

In fact, what I was told by Republican operatives is that Greene had a ceiling in the runoff and all I needed to do was warn voters about voting for her. They said she couldn’t win the runoff. They were wrong.

Erickson is suggesting that there wasn't enough available dirt on Greene to defeat her. But there was -- it just wasn't the right kind of dirt.

Greene came first in her primary on June 9 -- but because she didn't win more than 50% of the vote, she faced a runoff on August 11.

Between the primary and the runoff, we learned a lot about her.

On June 11, the Daily Beast reported:

... Greene has praised QAnon. In a video posted online, she called the anonymous “Q” a “patriot” and said that their predictions had been accurate.

“Many of the things that he has given clues about and talked on 4Chan and other forums have really proven to be true,” Greene said....

Greene has also posted about QAnon on social media, tweeting QAnon catchphrases “Trust the plan” and “#GreatAwakening” and praising a QAnon clue as an “awesome post” in 2018....

In another video, Greene pursued Parkland shooting survivor and gun-control advocate David Hogg in the street outside in Washington, saying in her video that Hogg is a “coward” with “George Soros funding.”

That's right -- the video that made so much news this week was posted by the Daily Beast before Greene even won her runoff.

On June 17, Politico reported:

... POLITICO uncovered hours of Facebook videos in which [Greene] expresses racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views.

[She] suggested that Muslims do not belong in government; thinks black people “are held slaves to the Democratic Party”; called George Soros, a Jewish Democratic megadonor, a Nazi; and said she would feel “proud” to see a Confederate monument if she were black because it symbolizes progress made since the Civil War....

In recordings obtained by POLITICO, Greene described Islamic nations under Sharia law as places where men have sex with "little boys, little girls, multiple women" and "marry their sisters" and "their cousins." She suggested the 2018 midterms — which ushered in the most diverse class of House freshmen — was part of “an Islamic invasion of our government” and that “anyone that is a Muslim that believes in Sharia law does not belong in our government.”

In other videos, she directly compared Black Lives Matter activists to the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members who marched at a white nationalist rally three years ago in Charlottesville, Va., denouncing them all as “idiots.” And Greene forcefully rejected the notion there are racial disparities in the U.S. or that skin color affects the “quality” of one's life: “Guess what? Slavery is over,” she said. “Black people have equal rights.” ... In a video and on social media, Greene has also touted an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Soros, a Holocaust survivor, collaborated with the Nazis.

“George Soros says dark forces have been awakened by Trump’s win. I don’t think so,” she said in one video. “George Soros is the piece of crap that turned in — he’s a Jew — he turned in his own people over to the Nazis.”

In February 2019, Greene replied to a tweet that included several memes accusing Soros of being part of a secret totalitarian world government. One picture showed Soros as a vampire who controls “every single Democrat politician.” In her reply, Greene called Soros “the Nazi himself trying to continue what was not finished.”

As noted in the Politico story, a few Republicans expressed concern about Greene. But the party clearly didn't think it had a major problem on its hands. There was no pressure from top Republicans to drive her out of the race.

Why? Because the outrageous things she was reported to have said weren't considered outrageous by Republicans. Republicans don't consider anti-Islamic bigotry outrageous. They don't regard anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros as outrageous. They don't think harassment of gun control advocates, even those who have survived mass shootings, is outrageous. And they don't believe that QAnon, which posits that all Democrats are cannibalistic pedophiles, is outrageous.

The warning signs were there -- but they were the wrong warning signs. Jewish space lasers? Republicans would have considered that a warning sign. All of our enemies are Hitler-level monsters? Not a problem. And that's why Greene is in Congress now.

GREAT MOMENTS IN HORSESHOE THEORY

Wait -- what?

The New York Young Republican Club has announced a “Re-Occupy Wall Street” protest in Zuccotti Park in response to brokers shutting down trading on Game Stop and other memed stocks.

The shut down of purchasing stocks caused the price to crash, helping rich hedge fund managers and hurting the lower class who were buying the stocks.

The protest will be taking place on Sunday, January 31, at noon. The organizers are encouraging people to dress warmly.

“Let your voices be heard! We are sick of Wall Street bailouts on the taxpayer dime while the little guy gets stomped!” the Eventbrite page for the protest reads.

I'm quoting a post at Gateway Pundit, which was not particularly fond of the original Occupy Wall Street protests.

The president of the NYYRC is this guy:

.@NYYRC will be staging a protest in Zuccotti Park to re-occupy Wall Street.

We are sick & tired of bailing out the fat cats and hedge funds for their own mistakes while they stomp on the little guy for trying to make a buck.

This is not capitalism. https://t.co/C9lxW5g4Wf

— Gavin Mario Wax 🇺🇸 (@GavinWax) January 28, 2021

Wax is a terrible person:

Since October, 2018, [Wax] has been listed as a partner in the Yorkville Group, a political consultancy firm whose founder bragged about advising the anti-Muslim, Nazi-sympathizing German political party Alternative fur Deutschland....

Also in October, 2018, Wax also called the Proud Boys ... a “patriotic fraternal group who like America and beer,” in an American Thinker article....

Wax’s ties to far-right figures have grown stronger in recent months, according to a lengthy report on him in the blog Angry White Men.

In July, he appeared on a podcast run by VDARE, a white-nationalist and anti-immigrant website. He was interviewed by John Derbyshire, who was fired as a columnist at National Review in 2012 after including a racist statement about Black people in an article and who has written sympathetically about white supremacy.

On Twitter, Wax has praised Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Enoch Powell, the British politician who delivered the violently anti-immigrant “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, and has parroted conspiracy theories about George Soros....

Meanwhile, in Wyoming, Matt Gaetz is trying to sound like a Bush-era lefty:

Rep. Matt Gaetz fired off a barrage of insults against his colleague Liz Cheney during a rally in her home state of Wyoming on Thursday....

Gaetz ... attacked Cheney for the role her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, played in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He disparagingly called Liz Cheney a "neocon," saying she advocated unnecessary wars in the Middle East.

"The neocons say we got to fight them abroad so we don't have to fight them at home," Gaetz said. "I was going to say that maybe we ought to fight the neocons at home so we don't have to fight them in Washington, D.C. But that's problem, isn't it, because the neocons are home at Washington, D.C."

"The real cowboys, I guess, fought the Indians so they could use the land, but what are America's soldiers even fighting for that Liz Cheney sends around the world?" he added. "Places that most Americans couldn't even point to on a map."

Donald Trump turned the party that called you a traitor if you opposed the Iraq War into the party that calls you a traitor if you didn't. I still don't understand why Trump was reluctant to go to war as president, though I'm grateful -- probably it was his hatred of the Bush family, and possibly the fact that the generals made every war he might have wanted to start seem really complicated -- but here we are, in Pat Buchanan paleoconservative territory, with Gaetz using the old slur "neocon" even though Liz Cheney isn't Jewish.

Sorry I don't have a coherent theory about how all this fits together. Elements of the Trump right appear to have progressive envy -- and the populist/white nationalist/isolationist wing of the right often sounds like the left if you're not listening closely.

WHY WE MIGHT NEVER BE RID OF MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE

Marjorie Taylor Greene is becoming a national embarrassment for the Republican Party -- or she would be if Republicans were capable of shame. Media Matters has the latest:

Rep. Greene is a proponent of the Camp Fire laser beam conspiracy theory. She wrote a November 17, 2018, Facebook post -- which is no longer available online -- in which she said that she was speculating “because there are too many coincidences to ignore” regarding the fire, including that then-California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) wanted to build the high-speed rail project and “oddly there are all these people who have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires.” She also speculated that a vice chairman at “Rothschild Inc, international investment banking firm” was somehow involved, and suggested the fire was caused by a beam from “space solar generators.”

You can read the now-deleted post at the Media Matters link above. But will it trouble any Republican voters? I doubt it. I'm sure a large percentage of them think this is exactly the way the world works, and thus believe that Greene's theory seems quite plausible. The rest are just pleased that she hates Democrats, trains, and "globalist" financiers.

It's unlikely that the Republican Party will pressure Greene to resign, or even strip her of her committee assignments, which is what the party did to Steve King when his racism finally began to seem like too much of a liability -- at this point, rejecting her would probably offend the GOP voter base almost as much as rejecting Donald Trump would.

But isn't it possible that her fundraising will dry up? King's did in the run-up to the 2020 election cycle, in which he lost to a primary challenger. But as the Georgia Recorder's Daniel Newhauser tells us, Greene's money mostly comes from small-money donors and rich people who are just as crazy and angry as she is.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene ... doesn’t have much in the way of corporate PAC money in her fundraising coffers to begin with, according to a Recorder analysis of her campaign records.

And unlike companies like AT&T, Coca-Cola, Marriott, and GE, some of Greene’s largest donors are cheering on her continued false claims that former President Donald Trump won the November election....

Take the Howalt family, owners of Dalton’s Textile Rubber & Chemical Co., a multinational and multi-million dollar company based in Greene’s district that manufactures compounds used to make backings for rugs, among other things....

When contacted via email, Frederick “Chip” Howalt, ... president of the company, said that not only will his family continue donating to Greene, they will refuse to donate to any candidate who doesn’t claim the election was stolen.

“We are not re-thinking our support of [Greene] one bit. If anything, we’ll find a legal way to increase it,” he said in an email. “The only financial support our Family will pull will be from ANY RINO’s [Republicans in name only] complicit in blocking investigations into Voter Fraud and Irregularities (GA had many) and not Objecting to confirm the Biden Electors where practical and advisable to do so.”

Bill Pope, the owner of Texas-based NCIC, a paid phone and messaging system for prisoners, said he won’t stop donating to Greene either in the wake of her actions following the Capitol attack.

“I’ll donate. That’s not stopping me. That was the media pushing one riot versus another,” he said. “I mean, she didn’t pull her support for Trump. I’m kind of mad at [U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell, but hey.”

... the donor rolls of Greene’s campaign committee, leadership political action committee and affiliated super PAC read like a who’s who of conservative rabble rousers, unlikely to be cowed by bad press for supporting Greene. There’s L. Lin Wood, the one-time celebrity attorney to the accused Atlanta Olympics bomber who has made a personal cause of egging on conspiracy theories and challenging the election of President Joe Biden.

There’s Thomas Beckwith, the Florida businessman who successfully challenged the Obama-era contraceptive rules. Citizens United donated, as did the Gun Owners of America, a farther-right version of the NRA.

Don't stereotype the people who support candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene as toothless yokels. Some of them are CEOs. Mike Lindell isn't the only politcal ignoramus in a C-suite.

So she'll probably have the money to run as many campaigns as she wants. We'll be rid of her only if Democrats find a way to make her more trouble than she's worth to the GOP.

(Georgia Recorder story via Paul Canning.)

THERE WERE MANY GATEWAY DRUGS FOR TRUMPISM

He seems nice:

SACRAMENTO — A suspected far-right extremist and radicalized supporter of former President Trump facing federal explosives charges may have been targeting California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco Bay Area headquarters of social media giants Twitter and Facebook, according to the FBI.

Federal prosecutors charged Ian Benjamin Rogers, 43, of Napa County, with possessing five homemade pipe bombs that investigators found when they searched his home and auto repair business Jan. 15. They also confiscated additional bomb-making material along with 49 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

According to an FBI affidavit, Rogers made multiple threats in text messages to attack Democratic targets and ensure that Trump stayed in office.

In the texts, Rogers stated, “Let’s see what happens then we act” and later added, “I’m thinking sac office first target” and “Then maybe bird and face offices.”

The FBI assumes that these are references to Governor Newsom's Sacramento office and to the offices of Twitter ("bird") and Facebook ("face").

More:

On Jan. 10, four days after the Capitol attack, Rogers texted a friend: “We can attack Twitter or the democrats you pick” and “I think we can attack either easily.” The other unidentified individual wrote back, “Let’s go after Soros,” referencing George Soros.

Rogers said that would require a “road trip,” whereas, “We can attack Twitter and democrats easy right now burn they’re (sic) shit down.”

On Jan. 11, Rogers texted the same person: “I want to blow up a democrat building bad ... The democrats need to pay.”

He again referenced the presidential election.

“I hope 45 goes to war if he doesn’t I will,” Rogers texted.

At Rogers’ business, British Auto Repair of the Napa Valley, investigators said they found a large gun safe, along with suspicious literature, including “The Anarchist Cookbook,” a U.S. Army Improvised Munitions Handbook, “Homemade C-4: A Recipe for Survival,” the U.S. Army Special Forces Guide to Unconventional Warfare, and a U.S. Army Guerrilla Warfare Handbook.

Also:

According to the criminal complaint, several of the firearms seized from Rogers’ home and business were capable of fully automatic firing, including “what appears to be a kit-built replica MG-42 belt-fed machine gun” which a firearms expert is currently examining.

“I know from my own research and discussions with other agents and officers that the MG-42 was a machine gun produced in Germany during World War II for use by Nazi troops,” FBI Special Agent Stephanie Minor said in an affidavit supporting the criminal complaint.

And, for good measure:

Authorities say Rogers was also in possession of a 'White Privilege Card,' which referenced Trump numerous times.

The card says 'Trumps Everything' and the number of '0045' repeated four times like a credit card number, a nod to Trump being the 45th president.

It lists the cardholder as being a member since birth and until death.

We can blame Trump for this, but it looks as if Rogers was heading in this direction for a while.

Years of gun collecting — and an embrace of right-wing political views — preceded the arrest of Ian Benjamin Rogers last week, according to the mother of the 44-year-old auto repair shop owner....

In a telephone interview Monday, Elaine Bihn Kley described an accumulation of guns and ammunition by her son that concerned her, as well as an increasing alliance to President Trump and commentators of similar right-wing views.

“He had the ammunition for years; he used to have it in the house when I cleaned,” said Kley, who described the Sonoma native, who was arrested Friday morning, as a devoted Fox News Channel watcher with pictures of Trump and President Ronald Reagan in his home.

Rogers is a middle-aged divorced man who owns a business repairing high-end British cars. If his mother said he had this ammo when he lived with her, that must have a while ago.

“He thought there would be a time when he wouldn’t be able to get ammunition. He was listening to people who were pro-gun, so he was stockpiling it thinking someone was going to break into his house, break into his business, that there was going to be a civil war in the U.S.” ...

“Went to my local gun shop today in Napa, they sold 10 Glock 19s in 24 hours,” read a Dec. 12, 2015 posting on Roger’s Facebook account. “Pretty scary times, people are scared and everyone feels our Government is not going to protect them. Crazy times, if you want a handgun better buy one quick all California approved guns are almost gone”

December 2015? Trump was campaigning for president at the time, but there wasn't a Trump cult then. Why did Rogers think there was a desperate need to buy guns at that moment? A few tightened gun laws were set to take effect in California on January 1, 2016, but nothing that would justify stockpiling.

But, of course, the NRA and much of the firearms community is forever warning of the impending disarmament of gun-loving Americans. Gun paranoia -- which goes back decades -- was a gateway drug for many paranoid Trumpers.

Also:

Jess Raphael, Rogers’ attorney, said ... Rogers was a gun collector, ... but not in a militia, only participating in a “prepper group” that focused on preparing for end-of-the-world type scenarios.

I think we've largely overlooked the doomsday-prepper movement as an incubator for the kind of paranoia that's fueling Trumpism and QAnon. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, life goes on in America much the way it did a year or two ago. The prepper minset prepares its adherents for the notion that everything we know about normal life will probably be upended relatively soon. That worldview isn't good for your mental health. If you think normal life will end soon, you're primed to believe that there's no reason to continue adhering to normal constraints on your own behavior. And every new development in the world that you find worrisome -- the election of a president you don't like, for instance -- can look like a sign of the Last Days.

Ian Rogers is a product of the Trump movement, but he's also a product of a generalized right-wing paranoia that existed in America long before Trump ran. We ignored it for too long, and we're paying the price now.

YOUR RIGHT-WING RELATIVES PROBABLY THINK JOE BIDEN IS MURDERING D.C. COPS

It's being reported that another policeman who was on duty at the Capitol on January 6 died by his own hand.

A second police officer who responded to the violent insurrection that rocked the Capitol Building on Jan. 6 has died by suicide, according to testimony obtained by POLITICO.

Acting Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee told House appropriators during a closed-door session on Tuesday that Jeffrey Smith, a D.C. Police officer, and Capitol Police Officer Howard Liebengood both “took their own lives in the aftermath of that battle.”

Smith’s death had not been disclosed prior to Contee’s testimony.

You can probably guess how the commenters at Gateway Pundit are responding to that news:

Another cop who was about to blow the whistle on the truth dies from one to the back of the head.

****

The Men Who Knew Too Much

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I don't believe a word these authorities say. People don't commit suicide over a little scuffle.

****

What does a suicide have to do with the capitol protest? NOTHING! Unless he got Seth Rich-ed!

****

line up the body bags. The dems are back in control.

****

What did he know and when did he know it? Where was HilLiARy's wet works team?

****

Hillary Clinton buys body bags in bulk.

****

He got Epsteined

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Vince Fostered

****

Two suicides.

****

Whats are the odds of that? Probably the same as the states that all found votes for Xiden at the same time.

(The folks at GP believe Biden is in thrall to China and Xi Jinping, hence "Xiden.")

yep just like the election. Orders were given and anyone trying to find out who gave them is being silenced ... in this case forever. Interesting that the left likes to make it known that the other 2 officers were staunch (r)s or Trump supporters. Don't know about this guy - but if he was, there's the hat trick.

****

It also sends a message to the other co-conspirators cops to keep their mouths shut, otherwise....

****

The police are with BLM/Antifa. As hard to believe as it sounds, it seems to be true.

Yes, folks, it's now acceptable on the right to say that cops are bad -- at least when they oppose the agenda of the God Emperor and his followers.

Blue Lives Matter is so 2020. Now only MAGA lives matter.

THE OHIO SENATE RACE COULD BE THE UGLIEST CONTEST OF 2022

At first glance, this seems promising:

Some Democrats are looking to a political outsider described as the "Dr. Fauci of Ohio" to replace Rob Portman in the U.S. Senate.

... Amy Acton, former director of the Ohio Department of Health, gained a grassroots following last year when she briefed Ohioans about the state of the coronavirus. Her celebrity could help in a Republican state, and against potential GOP rivals such as Rep. Jim Jordan.

... Acton quickly became an unlikely icon to Ohioans, praised for her poise and compassion during one of the most distressing times for the country.

Something she said at one of her daily public health updates — "I am not afraid; I am determined." — was emblazoned on T-shirts.

Fans launched a "Dr. Amy Acton Fan Club" on Facebook, and it's since attracted over 124,000 people — twice the size of Acton's hometown of Youngstown.

Acton won praise during the early months of the pandemic, as a November New Yorker profile notes:

A singer performed an Amy Acton tribute song on YouTube (“I trust you completely”; “You look so fine in your long white coat.”) The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum unveiled an Amy Acton figure. Little girls dressed up like Acton and staged living-room press conferences.... In a poll, in March, [Acton] had a much higher favorability rating than Trump—sixty-four per cent.

But despite support from Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, Acton resigned after only a few months of the pandemic -- with good reason.

An “Anti Amy Acton” page appeared on Facebook, containing such posts as “We will always hate you Abortion Amy!!” (The Ohio health department oversees clinics that perform abortions.) She was called a “witch,” a “disgrace.” In one photo, the marquee at Phil’s Lounge & Beer Garden, in Sharonville, said, “Fuck you DeSwine and Hackton.” Protesters disrupted Acton’s press conferences by chanting outside the statehouse and pressing their faces against the windows. After Acton, who is Jewish, mentioned hosting a virtual seder, for Passover, protesters showed up at her home, with guns, wearing MAGA caps and carrying “TRUMP” flags. Their signs read “Dr. Amy Over-re-ACTON” and “Let Freedom Work.” They brought their children. DeWine told demonstrators, “I’m the elected official” and “Come after me.” Acton was assigned executive protection—a rare measure, for a public-health official—along with a retinue of state troopers.

In April, the wife of a Republican state senator played the Hitler card in response to a public statement by Acton:

A couple of weeks later, a Republican state legislator called her a "globalist":

In addition, the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue didn't like the fact that Acton had permitted an abortion clinic near Dayton to remain open after it had been ordered closed by a previous state health director, describing Acton's decision as a “duplicitous paperwork shuffle.” (In fact, the clinic had come into compliance with a law requiring backup physicians for emergencies.) So OR went low -- it challenged Acton's accounts of her own childhood, then claimed credit for driving her out of office.

Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton resigned suddenly today, citing inability to cope with the overload of work the job required....

This came a week after Operation Rescue called for her resignation after publishing an exposé that included information on her Ohio medical license application that indicated she had been treated for mental illness and/or addiction issues at some point in the past.

That exposé also included audio clips from Operation Rescue’s interview with Donna Arthur, Acton’s estranged mother.

Arthur claimed that her daughter falsely accused her second husband of raping her when she was 12 years old. Acton had publicly claimed that both Arthur and her husband were criminally charged with abusing her, but “skipped town” before they could be prosecuted.

However, Operation Rescue verified that Arthur had never been charged and that her step father had charges dismissed. Acton then went to live with her father after she had made the allegations and never saw her mother again.

Arthur also refuted the allegation as untrue that Acton was homeless, neglected, and hungry as a child – something that Acton has repeatedly claimed.

The race will be nasty if Acton is the Democratic candidate -- especially if her Republican opponent is Jim Jordan. But I worry less about Jordan than I do about the militants who opposed Acton and her state's public health response when she was in office.

Hey! A second pic of these cool dudes from today. #makethemfamous pic.twitter.com/5y8UCJuvNQ

— Rep. Casey Weinstein (@RepWeinstein) April 19, 2020

Even if the pandemic is effectively over by 2022, this will resurface.

If Acton runs, she's brave. But it will be a vicious campaign.

I ASSUME NOTHING WILL HAPPEN TO MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE, EITHER (updated)

Oh, what's the use?

All but five Republican senators backed former president Donald Trump on Tuesday in a key test vote ahead of his impeachment trial, signaling that the proceedings are likely to end with Trump’s acquittal on the charge that he incited the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The vote also demonstrated the continued sway Trump holds over GOP officeholders, even after his exit from the White House under a historic cloud caused by his refusal to concede the November election and his unprecedented efforts to challenge the result.

...senators ... voted on an objection raised by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) questioning the constitutional basis for the impeachment and removal of a former president.

It's clear that nearly everyone in the GOP is afraid of Trump, which is why this is pointless:

Sens. Tim Kaine and Susan Collins are privately pitching their colleagues on a bipartisan resolution censuring former President Trump, three sources familiar with the discussions tell Axios.

... In some ways, a censure vote could be more difficult for Republicans, because they can't rely on the argument that a resolution is unconstitutional — like they are for an impeachment conviction.

It would also be a history-making vote. No other president has been censured after leaving office.

Right, and the same way Republicans have all rallied around the argument that it's wrong to impeach someone who's no longer president, they'll rally around the argument that it's wrong to censure someone who's no longer president. Soon we'll learn that Trump is threatening consequences for any Republican who votes for even this toothless chastisement. So this won't pass, either.

But it's not just that Trump is a crime family boss whom no one dares to cross. Watch nothing happen to this backbencher who's been in office less than a month:

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress, a CNN KFile review of hundreds of posts and comments from Greene's Facebook page shows....

In one post, from January 2019, Greene liked a comment that said "a bullet to the head would be quicker" to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In other posts, Greene liked comments about executing FBI agents who, in her eyes, were part of the "deep state" working against Trump.

In one Facebook post from April 2018, Greene wrote conspiratorially about the Iran Deal, one of former President Barack Obama's signature foreign policy achievements. A commenter asked Greene, "Now do we get to hang them ?? Meaning H & O ???," referring to Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Greene replied, "Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient. This must be done perfectly or liberal judges would let them off."

...In one speech, promoting the petition, Greene suggested Pelosi could be executed for treason.

"She's a traitor to our country, she's guilty of treason," Greene says in the video, which she posted on Facebook at the time. "She took an oath to protect American citizens and uphold our laws. And she gives aid and comfort to our enemies who illegally invade our land. That's what treason is. And by our law representatives and senators can be kicked out and no longer serve in our government. And it's, uh, it's a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason."

In a different America, members of both parties would be demanding Greene's resignation. But we now live in a country where Donald Trump won 74 million votes in his second presidential run, and where he could urge on a mob that rioted in the Capitol and still leave office with poll numbers 10 or more points higher than the worst ratings recorded by Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, or George W. Bush. (If they poll Trump again in a month, I guarantee he'll be back in the 40s.)

No one is afraid of Greene, but Republicans are afraid of the voting bloc that regards her as a hero. So they'll protect her. They'll describe any attempts to drive her from Congress as "cancel culture."

And why not? Democrats will never make a habit of arguing that the entire Republican Party is as bad as Greene. Only Republicans do that. They equate the entire Democratic Party with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar -- who are decidedly to the left of center but have never threatened any president or member of Congress with death. Democrats, inexplicably, will never say that the GOP is the Marjorie Taylor Greene party.

When voters abandon the Republican Party because it's lousy with extremists and conspiratorialists, when prominent officeholders are regulalry asked whether they'll disavow the party because of its clear support for extremism, then someone like Greene will be treated as the liability she is. But we're not even close to that.

*****

AND: This repulsive libel won't matter either.

In another newly uncovered 2018 Facebook post, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) endorsed a conspiracy theory that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was videotaped murdering a child during a satanic ritual and then ordered a hit on a police officer to cover it up....

Greene is ... a backer of the violent and absurd “Frazzledrip” conspiracy theory, which is linked to QAnon and Pizzagate and essentially claims that Hillary Clinton and former aide Huma Abedin sexually assaulted a child, filleted her face, wore her face like a mask, and then drank her blood as part of a satanic ritual to ingest something called adrenochrome....

Greene endorsed the conspiracy theory on Facebook in May 2018. She posted a picture of the mother of slain New York Police Department Detective Miosotis Familia with former President Donald Trump. A commenter wrote: “This is the mother of a NYPD officer who watched a horrific video seized on anthony weiners laptop of huma and hillary filleting a childs face. This was another hillary hit.” Greene liked that comment and replied: “Yes Familia.”

Axios says that with all this going on, Kevin McCarthy intends to give Greene a good talking-to.

Mark Bednar, a spokesperson for McCarthy, told Axios he is aware of the comments and will discuss them with Greene.

"These comments are deeply disturbing and Leader McCarthy plans to have a conversation with the Congresswoman about them," Bednar said in an emailed statement.

Yeah, that'll show her!

It's said that Donald Trump was such a scandal machine that we went numb during his presidency and weren't able to respond to outrages the way we used to. Well, he's gone now, but we're still numb, aren't we?

THE NEXT COUP WON'T LOOK LIKE THE LAST ONE

I'm seeing this a lot, but I don't agree with it:

“When a coup attempt goes unpunished, it becomes a training exercise.”

— Spirit of 2021 (@damspahn) January 24, 2021

Yesterday I wrote about the launch video for the gubernatorial campaign of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. As I noted, Sanders described the January 6 Capitol riot as one of the signs that America needs "law and order." (The other signs: the shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise and this summer's anti-racism unrest.)

Much of the right thinks the Capitol riot was a bad thing. I assume the non-QAnon wing of the GOP sees it as an embarrassment for the party, and recognizes what a danger it was to many party members. Some of the rank-and-file crazies think it was a set-up, as do some Republican officials.

In Oregon, the state Republican Party ... falsely claims the entire episode was a “false flag” staged to discredit the GOP and silence Trump’s supporters.

Last week, the state party released a resolution passed by its executive committee that says the supposedly fake operation was meant to undermine Trump and give more power to President Biden, citing websites by John Solomon and the Trump-friendly Epoch Times.

“The violence at the Capitol was a ‘false flag’ operation designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters, and all conservative Republicans; this provided the sham motivation to impeach President Trump in order to advance the Democratic goal of seizing total power,” the resolution says.

Most on the right don't want a repeat of January 6.

That doesn't mean they don't want to steal elections. But if they try to steal another one, most of them want to do without chaos and violence. They'll want to do it through vote suppression, and failing that, through the manipulation of laws so their theft will appear legal.

Donald Trump loves upheaval. He likes to be seen as a guy who walks into a room and starts breaking stuff if he doesn't get his way. That's his brand.

Most elite Republicans would be happy to see the system finagled the way they thought Trump might finagle it when they first embraced him in 2016. They thought it would be "the art of the deal" -- hardball boardroom maneuvering without the appearance of disorder. That's what they'll aim for in the future.

LIKELY TO BE THE MOST DEFACED BILL, THANKS TO OUR CONSERVATIVE FRIENDS

This is good news:

The Biden administration says it is "exploring ways to speed up" release of $20 bills featuring abolitionist Harriet Tubman after the Trump administration delayed the move first initiated by President Barack Obama....

There are production factors that will need to be considered in order for the bill to be released before 2028 -- when the Trump administration estimated the new note would be unveiled. For example, the Tubman bill will need to [be] produced in a new, high-speed printing facility, which is currently scheduled to begin printing in 2025....

Tubman, the once-enslaved African-American woman who guided dozens enslaved people to their freedom through the Underground Railroad in the 1800s, would replace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.

I hope we get the Tubman twenties relatively soon -- although the reaction to them among many right-wingers is likely to be infantile and racist, if this Gateway Pundit comment thread is any indication:

Represents Demoncrat: Ugly, constipated-looking perpetually mad expression. They could have at least used Aunt Jemima. The was a sweet and friendly face

*****

That face could scare a dog off a meat wagon!

*****

It could be worse, they could want Abrams. 😬

*****

I'll use all $10s if this bs ever passes!

*****

Oh I've been waiting on this, don't let this opportunity to highjack the lefts SJW crap pass you by. Get creative, draw a red MAGA hat on her, give her a couple of buck teeth and give her green eyes or orange lizard eyes. I'm actually looking forward to seeing some very creative artwork.

*****

Put an X with a Sharpie on all of them ?

*****

Tank abrams will be the face of the EBT card!

*****

We'll put Trump on the $20 once we take control. Promote Jackson to the $100.

*****

She fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

*****

ALWAYS ANGRY AT THE WORLD AND NEVER HAPPY AND WHAT A WAY TO LIVE

*****

Look at TV now. If you were an alien and just visited America today, you would think 90% of the population of America is black. Every single commercial is focused on blacks and mixed race couples. The white guy is being minimized.

Nevermind the fact that Democrats chop up blacks like hamburger meat and Africa, which is run by blacks, still has 380 million people without basic sanitation and whites built the greatest nation on the planet in under 250 years.

It is all an agenda. It is called CULTURAL SUBVERSION... and it is very real military tactic.

*****

Most blacks in America are horrible people and just want to riot and burn stuff down. All the decent blacks want to move into white neighborhoods where people get treated with dignity and respect.

*****

YUP...Affirmative Action only served to pack government jobs with low life minorities and communist thugs and we are now reaping the fruit. When all the whites are out of work, where is the country going to get the tax revenue to pay reparations for slavery?

*****

Low IQ was the deciding hiring factor.

*****

I’ll definitely ask for 2 tens. Creepy.

*****

Harriet Tubman had brain damage, like all of today's liberals.

*****

Nothing says America Last like the proposed Tubman image.

*****

That's one fugly image. Would make me burn $20 bills...

*****

Turn them in at the bank for $10s. Don't just burn your money, no matter how much real value it has lost!

*****

Good point! But if anybody tried to pay me with a Fugman $20, I'd burn THEIR money!

*****

I don’t want a picture of a gorilla on the $20 bill.

*****

Zoo bucks.

*****

I know right! Looks like a mad or scared baboon.

*****

If they do it will be the most defaced bill in history

*****

Yep. WHITE OUT the image -- that'll really trigger libturds.

*****

Write "Trump won" on every one you see.

*****

Is ~everything~ about Ghetto-Americans these days?

And they can't understand why we think they're racist.

THE McCARTHYISM IS SO ROUTINE WE BARELY NOTICE IT

Sarah Huckabee Sanders has announced her run for governor of Arkansas. She'll win easily -- she's in the right party, she has the name recognition, and her first campaign video is a solid piece of work.

It's also a solid piece of demagoguery.

I'm in —> https://t.co/8bmfl3ZPgp

Watch ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/khDPEk0orU

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) January 25, 2021

The video runs nearly eight minutes. Barely a minute and a half in, Sanders says this:

We've seen violence in our streets, at a congressional baseball practice, and at our Capitol. This is not who we are as Americans. To remain free, we must have law and order and resolve our differences peacefully. The radical left's solution is to impose government control and censorship from the top down. But their socialism and cancel culture will not heal America. It will only further divide and destroy us. Everything we love about America is at stake. And with the radical left now in control of Washington, your governor is your last line of defense.

She goes on to say,

As governor, I will defend your right to be free of socialism and tyranny.

As she says this, we see the alleged tyrants: Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker. Later she says:

I took on the media, the radical left, and their cancel culture.

When she says this we see the radical leftist Jim Acosta of CNN.

Nancy Pelosi, shockingly, doesn't make an appearance in the video, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does, of course, about five and a half minutes in.

Remember, Sanders isn't running for Congress or president -- she's running for governor. Of Arkansas. Against Bernie Sanders and AOC. And while she eventually talks about issues a gubernatorial candidate should talk about -- jobs, taxes, the pandemic -- her focus is relentlessly on "socialism," "the radical left," and "cancel culture."

We talk a lot about Donald Trump's lies -- there were more than 30,000 of them -- but we don't talk about the Big Lie that every Republican politician and right-wing media figure tells: that all Democrats (and all non-conservative media figures) are members of "the radical left." Since "the radical left" can be blamed for political violence, that means every Democrat and every TV news person who isn't on Fox, Newsmax, or One America News is essentially responsible for burning buildings in Portland and the shooting of Steve Scalise.

Yes, Sanders does mention the Capitol riot -- apparently that's regarded on the right as a bad thing. But I'm sure she and her team know that quite a few of her potential voters blame the Capitol violence on Antifa, and most of the rest probably believe that left-wingers are ultimately to blame:

Or it could be that they watched the left get away with it for 9 months straight? https://t.co/2xmJSD5Prt

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 23, 2021

We don't even notice the routine McCarthyism of GOP rhetoric. It's in nearly every utterance of every Republican who stands before a microphone or otherwise has access to the media. Democrats don't do this -- they denounce Trump in strong terms, but they don't denounce every Republican every time they speak. Only a few even suggest that Republicans are similar to Nazis or fascists. But for Republicans, this is everyday talk -- so routine we don't even hear it anymore.

This video won't be seen as shockingly inflammatory or offputting. Maybe we need to develop more of a capacity for outrage.

WHAT'S HAPPENING IN THE ARIZONA GOP MAY NOT BE A BIG DEAL

If you thought it was possible that the Republican Party might come to its senses after this election and its aftermath, you can diabuse yourself of that notion:

[Arizona Republican] party members ... passed three resolutions censuring high-profile Republicans: Gov. Doug Ducey, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain. It was another sign of the party's move to the right.

The party censured Ducey over his decision to impose emergency rules during the pandemic that the GOP said "restrict personal liberties and force compliance to unconstitutional edicts."

McCain, who endorsed President Joe Biden, "has supported globalist policies and candidates" and "condemned President Trump for his criticism of her husband and erroneously placed behaviors over actual presidential results."

Flake has "condemned the Republican Party, rejected populism, and rejected the interests of the American people over globalist interests." The party suggested Flake join the Democrats.

Ducey, apparently unfazed, was asked by The New York Times about running for Senate in 2022 against Mark Kelly, whose 2020 victory was in a special election, and who'll therefore have to run again. Ducey issued a classic non-denial denial.

You met with Senator Mitch McConnell while you were in Washington. Are you open to running for the Senate in 2022, when you will be termed out of the governor’s office?

I’m not running for the United States Senate. I got to know Leader McConnell through the open seat with the passing of John McCain. The purpose of the meeting was to talk about the Covid-19 relief package.

Are you ruling out running for Senate?

I’m not running for the United States Senate. It’s a no. I’m 100 percent focused on being the governor of the state of Arizona. I’ve accepted the role as the chairman of the {Republican Governors Association]. So I’ve got a full-time job and then I’ve got a full-time job beyond that. And that’s what my focus is.

Use of the present tense in response to a question like this is a time-honored way of saying you're not running now, but you're leaving open the possibility of announcing a run later.

And why not? Consider what Cindy McCain said about her censure:

McCain in a tweet alluded to her late husband Sen. John McCain's own battles with the party.

"It is a high honor to be included in a group of Arizonans who have served our state and our nation so well ... and who, like my late husband John, have been censured by the AZGOP. I'll wear this as a badge of honor," she said.

That's right -- the same state party censured John McCain in 2014:

Arizona Sen. John McCain has gone soft when it comes to conservative principles. That's according to his state's Republican Party, who sent the former presidential candidate a message on Saturday by voting to censure him for his 'liberal' voting record.

... the resolution was approved on a voice vote during a meeting of state committee members in Tempe. It said McCain "has campaigned as a conservative but has lent his support to issues 'associated with liberal Democrats,' such as immigration reform and to funding the law sometimes known as Obamacare."

The five-term senator's bleeding-heart tendencies are "disastrous and harmful" to the state and the nation, the resolution said.

So what happened to John McCain after that? Two years laters, he ran for reelection -- as a Republican. He won the Republican primary 51%-40%, then won the general election by beating Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick 54%-41%. So these censures might not mean much.

McCain's main primary opponent in 2016 was Kelli Ward, who's now the Trump-loving and Trump-endorsed chair of the Arizona GOP. (She was narrowly reelected to that post last night.)

I'm guessing that Ward or someone like her will be the party's candidate against Kelly two years from now -- and I imagine many people who eagerly voted for McCain and Ducey will vote for Ward, or whichever Trumpist/QAnoner gets the nomination. But who knows? In the next two years, Ducey might tack rightward on a few issues and position himself as the guy who can take on the Evil Socialist Biden-Soros-AOC Administration, and he could be the nominee. And either way, it could be a GOP wave election, just like the wave elections Bill Clinton and Barack Obama experienced after they'd been in office two years.

Because that's how it tends to go in the GOP: The party is pulled further and further rightward, with most Establishment figures adapting so as not to be destroyed -- McCain did that, particularly in his previous race in 2010, when he also faced a far-right primary challenger -- but the percentage of the electorate that supports the party never really changes.

Maybe this time it will be different. I'm not counting on that.

And no, I don't expect a Trumpist "Patriot Party" to create a serious GOP crack-up. Trump is issuing threats now in order to minimize the number of Republicans who'll vote to convict him in his upcoming Senate trial. He'll get his way -- no more that two or three Republicans will vote to convict, and it could just be Mitt Romney, or not even Romney.

Trump will probably back primary challengers to the Republicans on his hit list, but if he were serious about starting a third party, he wouldn't be talking about primary challenges. He'd be threatening to sink his enemies in general elections -- third-party candidates don't run in primaries.

It's likely that Trumpists will defeat a few of his enemies -- but then they'll be the new Republicans, just like the Tea Party candidates in 2010 and beyond. Eventually, you won't even remember who was regarded as an insurgent and who was an establishmentarian.

THE GOP WILL BE FINE EVEN IF TRUMP DOESN'T FADE AWAY

Jonathan Chait has written an astute column about the Republican crack-up that was supposed to be happening but now clearly isn't.

The heady predictions that the party would break free of the Trumpist grip already seem fanciful. If anybody is suffering repercussions for their response to Trump’s autogolpe, it is the Republicans who criticized it. Conservative Republicans are threatening to strip Liz Cheney of her leadership post after she voted to impeach Trump.... Adam Kinzinger, another pro-impeachment Republican, is facing censure. The Michigan Republican member of the state board of canvassers, who broke with his party to certify the state’s election results, is losing his job as a result of his refusal to go along with Trump’s lie. Fox News is firing journalists associated with its election call that Biden won Arizona.

Chait divides the party into three wings. The first is the Never Trump wing, which he describes as small. (I'd say it's nonexistent -- call yourself a Never Trumper and you're instantly blackballed by the party.) The second -- "a violent authoritarian wing" made up of pro-insurrectionists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, as well as "the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, and in the media by various commentators on the Fox News evening lineup, OAN, and Newsmax" -- is, Chait says, "of roughly equal size." (I'd say it's much larger.)

And then there's the third group:

In the middle is what you might call “soft authoritarians.” This faction’s political representation is figures like [Mitch] McConnell and [Mike] Pence, and its views are expressed by organs like The Wall Street Journal editorial page and National Review. They have supported most of Trump’s abuses of power, firmly opposing impeachment, Congressional oversight, efforts to obtain Trump’s tax returns, or any other accountability mechanism. The soft authoritarians strongly believe in the principle of minority rule, as long as it is enforced through peaceful and legal channels like gerrymandering and vote suppression.

These people, Chait says, "were appalled at Trump’s use of a barbarous mob to beat up police officers and smash down the Capitol’s doors and windows," but they also know how popular Trump is with their voters. So in the upcoming impeachment trial, they'll vote to acquit Trump, arguing that it's pointless to punish him now that he's out of office.

The path of least resistance for the soft authoritarianism will be to oppose Trump’s conviction on technical grounds, and then hope he fades away quietly.

But I question the notion that everyone in the middle group genuinely blames Trump for the riot. The headline-grabbing part of House minority leader Kevin McCarthy's recent interview with Greta Van Susteren is that he blames "everybody across this country" for the riot. But look at the (somewhat garbled) transcript below and you'll see that he's not blaming the entire country -- he's blaming Democrats and left-leaners specifically, as if their occasional moments of aggression somehow exceeded the torrent of vitriol from President Trump and the rest of the right. And then at the end he suggests that Nancy Pelosi was uniquely responsible for the security breakdown at the Capitol on January 6, joining Lindsey Graham and others in glossing over the fact that Capitol Police oversight is the joint responsibility of the House and Senate, which means that if Pelosi was at fault for January 6, so was Mitch McConnell.

Kevin McCarthy appeared to backtrack from his initial criticism of Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 riot, as @ArthurDelaneyHP wrote about https://t.co/UrtCmEaxjx But in his @greta interview, he claims there was no inconsistently and tries to explain pic.twitter.com/DJjhFfSOYy

— Amanda Terkel (@aterkel) January 23, 2021

A couple of weeks from now, when we finally have an impeachment trial, I assume that Trump's defenders won't simply argue that the proceeding is moot -- I assume "It was all Pelosi's fault" will be one of their main arguments.

In the FiveThirtyEight polling average, Trump's job approval rating never got lower than 38.0% near the end, and it ticked up slightly, to 38.6%, by his last day in office. I assume that Republicans were happy to slow-walk the impeachment trial because they believe that memories of the riot are fading fast and Trump's popularity among Republicans will soon be close to what it was before the riot. If they can muddy the waters on blame, it won't matter what Trump does afterward -- they'll have saved him in a second impeachment trial, their base will like them again, and America will have moved on. (Republicans will, of course, have moved on to blaming Joe Biden for every problem in America.)

They won't need Trump to "fade away." They'll just need to make America ungovernable -- their usual move when a Democrat is in the White House, and one that has always given them huge midterm wins.

By sometime later this year, they won't even need to memory-hole the riot. Much of America will recall it as just one more wacky thing Trump did -- nothing to get worked up over now. The base's Trump worship will continue unabated, and the GOP will move on with or without him.

FANCY WATCH-GHAZI!

The first thing you need to know about this gotcha ...

... is that on Election Day -- a mere 80 days ago -- the Times ran this:

That November story read in part:

HELSINKI, Finland — Keijo Paajanen was bewitched by a watch.

So much so that his life became deeply intertwined with the Vulcain Cricket, a Swiss timepiece known as the first mass-produced mechanical watch to successfully incorporate an alarm.

But there was another part of the watch’s past that attracted Mr. Paajanen even more: Released in 1947, it has been presented to many American leaders, earning it the nickname “The President’s Watch.”

... Starting in 1988 with President Ronald Reagan, who stopped in Finland en route to Moscow, Mr. Paajanen sent or personally presented the watch to seven of the 11 American heads-of-state known to have owned the model — almost every one from Truman to Trump.

The Times at that moment seemed delighted by the notion of a stylish presidential watch. (I see the Vulcain President Cricket priced from $3500 to $4500.)

But in today's story, we're told that President Biden wears a fancy watch, while recent presidents (Donald Trump excepted) have worn more seemly timepieces:

President Biden may cast his arrival in the White House as a return to business as usual at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but there’s at least one way he’s breaking from prevailing presidential tradition: he wears a Rolex.

At his inauguration, Mr. Biden laid his hand on the family Bible wearing a stainless steel Rolex Datejust watch with a blue dial, a model that retails for more than $7,000 and is a far cry from the Everyman timepieces that every president not named Trump has worn conspicuously in recent decades.

Presidents used to wear "power watches," we're told, but they've

gone out of style in the internet age, when most recent presidents, and politicians in general, seemed to consider the luxury watch as a signifier of out-of-touch elitism.

Bill Clinton seemed to thumb his nose at aristocratic gold timepieces by wearing a Timex Ironman, a “plastic digital watch, thick as a brick and handsome as a hernia,” as The Washington Post wrote in 1993.

Or maybe he couldn't afford aristocratic gold timepieces. Clinton wasn't very wealthy when he was elected president.

His successor, George W. Bush, went even more down market, wearing a Timex Indiglo, the kind once sold at drugstores.

The choice of a watch that cost $50 or less was either a man-of-the-people statement — even though Mr. Bush was an oil scion who went to Yale — or a masterstroke of old-money preppyism, where any hint of gilded glimmer is considered vulgar.

I'm going with the latter.

Barack Obama, too, avoided heirloom-level timepieces. During his presidency, he opted for mid-priced all-American watches by Shinola, the Detroit-based brand, or a sporty watch by Jorg Gray, based in Southern California, that cost less than $500.

"Mid-priced" for that Shinola watch is a matter of interpretation. It was a Runwell Sport Chrono, version of which are priced from $875 to $1500 on Shinola's website -- not super high-end, but a lot more expensive than a Timex.

This may come as a shock, but Mr. Trump shattered those norms. He remained on-brand during his term, flashing mogul-worthy gold (what else?) watches by Patek Philippe, Rolex, and Vacheron Constantin.

But the Times gave us dozens of stories over the past four years about how appealing the working class found Trump. Trump's advocates called him a "blue-collar billionaire," even though he was a rich man's son and grew up in a mansion.

We're told that Biden's expensive watches "embody a classic version of the American Dream: that anyone, even a kid from Scranton, can make it to the pinnacle of power." But still, they're expensive watches. "Haute Swiss watches," as they're called in the story.

But it's not as if all recent presidents apart from Trump disdained expensive watches. Bill Clinton has quite a collection of them now:

Since Bill Clinton left the White House he’s become an absolute watch hound. He’s been known to wear a Panerai PAM89 GMT, a Franck Muller, a Roger Dubuis MuchMore, a Kobold Seal, and a gold Cartier Ballon Bleu. The Swiss watch company Quinting has a photo of Clinton on its website wearing the brand’s Dove of Geneva watch.

Those are not cheap watches. Nor is the Rolex Cellini we're told Barack Obama now wears sometimes.

Here's one thing Clinton, Obama, and Biden have in common besides being Democratic presidents: They all made quite a bit of money from writing memoirs. Clinton's presidential memoir My Life was a huge success -- he really wasn't well off until he signed the deal for that book (and maybe that explains his changing taste in watches). Obama wrote two successful memoirs before being elected, plus another one published last fall. Biden's 2017 memoir Promise Me, Dad was a #1 bestseller.

So they've spent some of their royalties on watches. I can live with that. I think a lot of blue-collar people might do the same thing if they came into money.

But the Times has generated fodder for a hundred jabs at Biden from the right-wing media. Was that necessary?

COULD TRUMP'S SULKING KILL QANON?

From a January 20 Politico story about the end of Donald Trump's presidency:

His last days were quiet. He insisted he was working. “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening ... ” his public schedule said each day. But he wasn’t really working. He was disappearing.

He was a man, a leader, a president almost unrecognizable to those who had watched him over the past four years. Diminished. Adrift, Sullen.

I wasn't surprised that sulkiness was the flipside of Trump's arrogance and braggadocio. When things go seriously wrong for him, he considers it a profound injustice. So now he's thinking: How dare the world treat me badly! I'll show the world! I'll go mope in my room!

But I'm surprised that it's gone on for days. Maybe he could have rallied himself after failing to finagle the overturn of the election, and maybe he could have regrouped after being banned from Twitter, but it appears that the combination has his delicate ego flatlining.

(Why doesn't he just blog? He doesn't have to write long posts. Folks like Atrios and Instapundit have been writing mostly tweet-sized blog posts since before there was Twitter. Why couldn't someone set Trump up with a blog, maybe at donaldjtrump.com, and he could just write the same tweets he always wrote and post them there? In the waning days of his presidency, the world would have paid attention; now, his fan base would, at least.)

Which brings me to this Washington Post story about QAnon.

Tiffany, an Oklahoma mother of two who runs an online children’s boutique, had expected more arrests.

A believer in QAnon, ... she said she was “shocked” when Inauguration Day came and went without any of the mass military roundups of Trump’s enemies that Q, the movement’s prophet, had promised all along.

But after a night of processing the day’s events by reading QAnon promoters’ posts, she said she believes that everything is still humming along according to plan — and that Trump’s election loss was all part of Q’s master strategy to expose the evildoers who corrupted the vote.

“Things have just started,” said Tiffany, who spoke on the condition she’d be identified only by her first name for fear of harassment. “They had to ‘commit’ the crime to fully lock the deal.”

... QAnon promoters have in the past day held up an incoherent set of new theories to explain away Trump’s anticlimactic exit from Washington: that the military is in control of the country, not Biden; that Biden and Trump have switched faces; that Biden’s inauguration was illegitimate, and that the real one (for Trump) would take place in March; or that Biden has been in on the QAnon plan all along.

In QAnon-devoted Telegram channels and message boards, some QAnon believers have announced their worries that they now feel conned by a four-year-old hoax: “Power has changed hands and that is the end,” one user on Telegram said. “In the time we needed Trump and Q the most … [they] both shut up and left,” said another on a QAnon-related forum....

Ron Watkins, 8kun’s longtime administrator and a mass promoter of election-fraud conspiracy theories, said in a Telegram message on Wednesday that the White House transition meant it was time for his followers to “go back to our lives as best we are able.” His father and 8kun’s owner, Jim Watkins, later worked to defend Q’s “historical value,” saying on his Gab account that “the culture of our country has changed because of it.”

But we know "the Plan" won't come to fruition. If these people continue to wait for the mass arrests that will never happen and Trump never fully reemerges as a messiah figure, won't more of them drift away?

I'm skeptical of the theory advanced by the Post story that white nationalist groups might pick up QAnoners -- some might go that way, but I don't think stay-at-home moms will want to join a movement that's performatively macho. If Tiffany quits QAnon, she might throw herself full-time into vaccine skepticism or something similar, but I don't think she'll start celebrating Hitler's birthday or get a Fourteen Words tattoo.

And I don't see anyone stepping up to take Trump's place. I see politicians -- Josh Hawley, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Madison Cawthorn -- attempting to be political heroes to the alienated, but no one trying to be the kind of pop-culture superstar Trump always tried to be (a goal at which he succeeded from 2016 to the end of his term). The Republican Party will probably be led in the future by a Hawley or a Boebert, but I wonder whether QAnon can survive if its mythology isn't organized around a celebrity.

Meanwhile, here's what's going on at donaldjtrump.com:

It's frozen at a moment when Trump was still president, and when there was still a Trump-Pence ticket. Below it, there are still videos urging supporters to get out and vote. It's the website equivalent of Miss Havisham, the Dickens character who was left at the altar and wore her wedding dress for the rest of her life.

Trump will probably rally himself eventually, but maybe he won't -- maybe he'll never move past this moment. And maybe QAnon will die along with his dreams.