So Kyrsten Sinema has left the Democratic party and re-registered as an independent to shake up the Senate. The way I see it, she just primaried herself.

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has done the inevitable: She is leaving the Democratic Party.

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, the first-term senator said her decision to register as an independent in her home state “makes a lot of sense,” and that she won’t caucus with Republicans, meaning her decision won’t upset the balance of power in the US Senate after the reelection of Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia that gave Democrats a 51-49 majority earlier this week.

She told Tapper, “When I come to work each day, it’ll be the same,” Sinema said. “I’m going to still come to work and hopefully serve on the same committees I’ve been serving on and continue to work well with my colleagues at both political parties.”

Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money: “My favorite detail in this is that she won’t commit to caucusing with the Democrats, but she expects to keep all her committee assignments!” Yeah, that’s a knee slapper. The other Senate independents, Bernie Sanders and Angus King, formally caucus with Democrats and are counted as Dems as far as committees are concerned. Sinema possibly hadn’t thought that one out.

Aaron Blake at WaPo:

She becomes the first senator to leave her party since Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) in 2009. 

Like Specter, Sinema looked set to face an arduous primary if she sought reelection with her former party, given the maneuvering of Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) to run against her. So the move makes some sense for her personally.

But what about the political impact more broadly?

The House passed the Defense of Marriage Act, again.

The House had already passed an earlier version of the Respect for Marriage Act in July, but the Senate delayed its vote on the bill until after the midterm elections. Late last month, the Senate passed the bill with a bipartisan amendment to allay some Republicans’ concerns about religious liberty. The amended bill passed the Senate in a 61-36 vote, with 12 Republican senators joining Democrats in favor of it.

In a 258-169 vote, the House on Thursday passed the bill with the amendment, which clarifies that the federal government would not be authorized to recognize polygamous marriages and confirms that nonprofit religious organizations would not be required to provide “any services, facilities, or goods for the solemnization or celebration of a marriage.” Thirty-nine Republicans joined all Democrats in supporting the measure.

Weirdly, 47 House Republicans voted for the original bill, but only 39 for the amended bill. So they added an amendment to make it more conservative friendly and lost eight Republican votes. The hardline conservative caucus in the House pressured members to vote against it, I understand. I don’t have a list of which Republicans voted for the final bill, but I do know the list includes Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. No surprise there. Now President Biden can sign it, and it’s law.

In other news, Brittney Griner has been freed, exchanged for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. But Paul Whelan is still in a Russian prison.

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Moore v. Harper, the case the case that asks whether democracy is protected by the Constitution. Or, it deals with partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina and a far-right legal idea known as the independent state legislature (ISL) theory. ISL theory claims that only state legislatures have the authority to govern elections in their states, and what the legislatures decide cannot be vetoed by governors or state supreme courts. SCOTUS endorsement of ISL could potentially lead to state legislatures overturning elections if they don’t like the results.

It sounds as if the lawyers challenging ISL got the upper hand yesterday. Dahlia Lithwick:

The fake constitutional history supporting this nonexistent constitutional doctrine is so lacking in substance that it was almost impossible to believe that the high court could spend three hours taking it seriously.

The results were almost beyond parody: At one point, the North Carolina GOP legislature’s lawyer, David Thompson, in court to argue that the power to set election procedures is unreviewable by state courts, said that he would soon prove that this was the express intent of virtually all of the colonies from the jump. Justice Sonia Sotomayor mustered a terse response: “Yes if you rewrite history, it’s very easy to do …”

Justice Kagan said,

This is a theory with big consequences. It would say that if a legislature engages in the most extreme forms of gerrymandering, there is no state constitutional remedy even if the courts think that that’s a violation of the constitution. It would say that legislators could enact all manner of restrictions on voting, get rid of all kinds of voter protections that the state constitution in fact prohibits. It might allow the legislatures to insert themselves and to give themselves a role in the certification of elections and the way election results are calculated. So in all these ways, I think what might strike a person is that this is a proposal that gets rid of the normal checks and balances on the way big governmental decisions are made in this country.

Well, yes. See also at Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Asks Simplest, Most Damning Question As Supreme Court Entertains Canceling Democratic Elections at Above the Law.

As the argument unfolded, three distinct camps emerged, with Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor opposed to the whole goofy theory; Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas thrilling at the prospect of authoritarian rule; and the Chief, Barrett, and Kavanaugh wishing there was some way to let Republicans gerrymander at will without turning North Carolina elections into North Korean elections.

I liked this part.

Neal Katyal went right at the conservatives with receipts — straight up calling his shot, announcing that he’d been “waiting for this case” so he could unload his can of originalism on Justice Thomas — quoting back their own opinions from every time the shoe was on the other foot, prompting a series of blubbering exchanges from the frustrated justices. His exchange with Gorsuch set the tone. The justice asked Katyal for “one example” of the Court employing Katyal’s theory. He cited a 19th century example. “*grumble* Put that aside!” He cited another. Gorsuch rants and raves trying to figure out why he hadn’t researched this point.

And I liked this part:

But amid all the twists and turns from Justice Kagan’s incisive questioning (not-too-far-off translation by Professor Leah Litman: “So this theory could end our democracy. Response?“) to Justice Gorsuch arguing that the independent legislature theory is how pre-Civil War Virginia was a bulwark against the 3/5ths clause (or some nonsense), Justice Jackson delivered the most devastating bodyblow (no transcript… so this may be inexact):

I guess I don’t understand how you can cut the state constitution out of the equation when it is giving the state legislature authority to exercise the legislative power.

And Mark Joseph Stern:

After three hours of oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, only one thing is certain: If the justices want to blow up federal elections, they will have nothing to hide behind—not history, not logic, and certainly not the Constitution. The three lawyers defending democracy methodically dismantled the “independent state legislature” theory from every conceivable angle, debunking each myth, misreading, and misrepresentation deployed to prop it up. They bested the conservative justices who tried to corner them, identifying faulty reasoning and bogus history with devastating precision.

Those of us who’ve been ringing the alarm over this dangerous theory—and who’ve been disgusted by the campaign to drag it from the far-right fringe all the way to the Supreme Court—can take solace knowing that these capable lawyers exposed it as an utter fraud. 

We can’t celebrate yet, of course, because any time the future of democracy depends on the whims of Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Roberts — well, it ain’t good.

I’ve got to agree with Josh Marshall, that it’s a bad idea to watch television coverage on election nights.

If you’re into elections and want to watch results on election night you should never watch them on TV. Ever. If you were watching last night’s election on TV you probably had the sense the race was a close run thing with the lead bouncing back and forth, with Herschel Walker possibly mounting a comeback after weeks of coverage that made Raphael Warnock appear a favorite to win a full term. If you watched the results through my curated Twitter feed of election number crunchers, though, you saw something very different: from the very first returns it looked likely — and then with growing clarity — that the results would roughly bear out the polls, which showed Warnock with a modest but significant lead. The final results this morning show Warnock beating Walker by just shy of three percentage points, almost on the dot of what the consensus of polls predicted.

I decided I couldn’t deal with three hours of Steve Kornacki. I had the teevee tuned to to some crime drama thing, while I alternated between watching the good guys chase bad guys and checking the live feeds of commentary at the New York Times, Talking Points Memo, and other places. And by 8:30 Central Time the live feeds were saying “Warnock’s got this,” even though Walker was actually a bit ahead in the vote count at the time. A bit after 9 Central Time I happened to be looking at the vote totals on the WaPo page when it updated to show Warnock the projected winner. So then I knew it was safe to tune to MSNBC again. I don’t know if the people on CBS at that hour caught the bad guy, but I got to watch Rev. Warnock’s acceptance speech. Nice.

Still, it was damn close. Right now, with 99 percent of votes counted, it’s Warnock 51.4% and Walker 48.6%. Some commenters this morning are saying that a more “normal” Republican could have won, and I can’t argue. As atrocious a candidate as Walker was, he sure got a lot of votes.

Paul Campos writes at Lawyers, Guns & Money:

If we want to be pessimistic about things, we can focus on the fact that Herschel Walker — an almost indescribably terrible candidate by all conventional metrics regarding qualifications, such as being able to read, knowing the difference between the House and the Senate, not coercing the women he was beating up into abortions etc. — got almost exactly the same percentage of the vote in the runoff (48.6%) as the two other most recent Republican senate candidates (Kelly Loeffler, 49%; David Perdue, 49.4%).

More optimistically, this was 2022 not 2020, and the other Republican statewide candidates for governor, attorney general, and secretary of state all got between 52% and 53% of the vote, suggesting strongly that Walker’s absurd buffoonery of a campaign cost the Republicans about 4% of the vote, i.e., a deplorably small but ultimately decisive margin. Note that these other candidates were standard issue reactionary middle aged white guys, who kept the MAGA rhetoric mostly tamped down, didn’t seem to be severely brain damaged, and didn’t have a long line of women claiming that they had forced them to have abortions after beating them up and so forth.

In the runoff election on January 5, 2021, Warnock beat Kelly Loeffler 51% to 49%. I hadn’t remembered this, but Loeffler was planning to challenge the election result. Then January 6 happened, and she changed her mind and conceded.

Republicans are pointing out that the midterm elections in Georgia were very good for Republicans except for the Senate race. And this was because not-MAGA Republicans won the primaries, and then the GOP nominees went on to win the general. I get a sense that the GOP is mightily pissed at Trump for pushing Walker into the primary. But I’m not sure that Georgia has become quite as purple as some excited Democratic commenters believe. It does point to a path for Republicans to stop kowtowing to Trump, however.

Speaking of Trump — a couple of classified documents have just turned up in a a federally run storage site in West Palm Beach. 

Former President Donald J. Trump hired people to search four properties after being directed by a federal judge to look harder for any classified material still in his possession, and they found at least two documents with classified markings inside a sealed box in one of the locations, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump’s search team discovered the documents at a federally run storage site in West Palm Beach, Fla., the person said, prompting his lawyers to notify the Justice Department about them.

And here’s more background on the counties subpoenaed by Jack Smith.

Today’s the day — with any luck — we’ll finally see the end of the 2020 midterms. The FiveThirtyEight nerds say that Warnock has a slight lead, but Walker could still win. To me, that there are people bright enough to dress themselves and eat with a fork who will still vote for Walker is what’s wrong with America.

For example, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution interviewed a voter who said he was voting for Walker because he was afraid the Democrats would regulate cryptocurrency.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: One complication of the race today is that there was a libertarian candidate for the Senate seat in the November 8 election who ran a very distant third. But because this was a ranked choice vote, whoever those voters listed as their second choice will get those votes today. That seems weird, especially since those same voters are eligible to vote in today’s election. I question whether that’s accurate. But it is worrisome. Libertarians would probably have picked Walker over Warnock.

Awhile back I noted that the National Republican Senatorial Committee, still headed by Rick Scott, was sending out fund raising appeals ostensibly to elect Herschel Walker, but only one cent of every dollar donated was actually going to Herschel Walker’s campaign. Now the Salt Lake Tribune is reporting that  Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Burgess Owens are doing something similar.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Burgess Owens are raising money on behalf of Herschel Walker ahead of Tuesday’s Senate runoff election against Democrat Sen. Rafael Warnock, warning the Georgia Republican could be the final bulwark against President Joe Biden’s agenda. It is not immediately apparent to donors that half of the money they contribute will go to Walker’s campaign, while Lee or Owens keeps the other half.

Well, at least half the money being raised for Walker is going to Walker. That’s better than what the NRSC was doing. But Mediaite is reporting that lots of people in the GOP are pulling this same trick — sending out fundraising appeals for Walker but keeping a chunk of the donations for their own campaign committees or PACs. Names dropped include Donald Trump, J.D Vance, and Ted Budd. Meanwhile, money raised to re-elect Raphael Warnock is all going to Raphael Warnock.

Perhaps the best way to understand the Right is to imagine that most of them are 10-year-old boys. Then they kind of make sense.

For example — the latest in the Hunter Biden Laptop saga is that Matt Taibbi — who is now working for Elon Musk, apparently — released the “Twitter files,” which was some internal communication from the pre-Elon days in which Twitter staff debated whether to allow some files, allegedly from Hunter Biden’s laptop, to be published on Twitter. And after some discussion it was decided to nix them. I have not read the “Twitter files,” but I understand that the participants decided the material violated Twitter’s policy about publishing hacked material.

Much of the Right erupted in outrage and began screaming about “censorship,” showing us once again they don’t understand what “censorship” is, since Twitter is a private company and not the government.

Tim Miller writes at The Bulwark — in No, You Do Not Have a Constitutional Right to Post Hunter Biden’s Dick Pic on Twitter —

While normal humans who denied Republicans their red wave were enjoying an epic sports weekend, an insular community of MAGA activists and online contrarians led by the world’s richest man (for now) were getting riled up about a cache of leaked emails revealing that the former actor James Woods and Chinese troll accounts were not allowed to post ill-gotten photos of Hunter Biden’s hog on a private company’s microblogging platform 25 months ago.

Now if you are one of the normals—someone who would never think about posting another person’s penis on your social media account; has no desire to see politicians’ kids’ penises when scrolling social media; doesn’t understand why there are other people out there who care one way or another about the moderation policies surrounding stolen penis photos; or can’t even figure out what it is that I’m talking about—then this might seem like a gratuitous matter for an article. Sadly, it is not.

Because among Republican members of Congress, leading conservative media commentators, contrarian substackers, conservative tech bros, and friends of Donald Trump, the ability to post Hunter Biden’s cock shots on Twitter is the number-one issue in America this weekend. They believe that if they are not allowed to post porno, our constitutional republic may be in jeopardy.

I truly, truly wish I were joking.

Well, okay, I’m gathering from other news stories that the hacked files weren’t just dick pics. The files had been the subject of a New York Post article of October 2020, right before the election. The NY Post claimed to have proof found on Hunter Biden’s laptop that Joe Biden had met with an executive of Burisma, the Ukrainian company Hunter was working for, which allegedly indicated that Joe Biden used his influence as Vice President to benefit Burisma. Oh, and there were some “explicit” photos also. But none of the “evidence” regarding a Burisma connection, which any ten-year-old with a computer could have fabricated, actually says what it was that Joe Biden did, beyond being introduced to a guy. And the sourcing was obviously hinky.

It came out in 2021 that Twitter had chosen to suppress links to the Post story, and Twitter executives in 2021 said that the suppression was a mistake, but looking at the Post story now, I don’t think so. It seems to me to be a reasonable decision, given the skimpiness and murky provenance of the information.

And to this day no one has been able to show that Joe Biden did anything to help the Burisma company or Hunter Biden’s position in it. But the children won’t let go of it, because if they’re going to bring articles of impeachment against Joe Biden as payback for Trump’s impeachments, the Burisma non-scandal is mostly what they’ve got.

The Right is telling itself that Tim Miller’s Bulwark post “backfired.”

This piece is a masterpiece in dishonest strawman-ing. There’s no reason for anyone to who supposedly believes in “democracy” to defend suppressing news. So they have to pretend it wasn’t. https://t.co/KdIKzx9P57

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) December 3, 2022

What “news”? This was just a repetition of an allegation that was already making the rounds. And there’s nothing in the “Twitter files” that hadn’t come out from other sources some time ago. See also Elon Musk’s Big ‘Twitter Files’ Reveal Turns Into Snoozefest at Rolling Stone and Elon Musk’s promised Twitter exposé on the Hunter Biden story is a flop that doxxed multiple people at The Verge.

Josh Marshall:

I really thought they’d come up with more. Any big organization has a large number of idiots within it. I figured you could cherry pick some embarrassing asides from junior employees, at least since they have access to everyone’s emails and chats. Basically it was the responsible executives discussing whether to invoke their post-2016 rule against publishing hacked material. They decided to do so, said they needed to be cautious and most of all find out more information.

Again, people taking their responsibilities seriously, trying to make the right decisions. Shocking stuff.

Taking responsibilities seriously, or “adulting” in any form, is not a concept the children can grasp.

While this episode has been taking up way too much space on the Intertubes, other things have happened that might be important. For example, Trump is now calling for the Constitution to be suspended.

This is a screen grab. I’m not linking to crap on Truth Social. It’s not hard to find, if you want to find it.

And I want to say I’m encouraged that the Democratic Party finally is demoting the Iowa Caucuses as the first-in-the-nation nomination event, and the New Hampshire primary as first primary. In both 2016 and 2020 the caucuses showed us they didn’t deserve the responsibility. See Thanks Loads, Iowa from February 4, 2020. No more of that crap. I have fewer complaints about New Hampshire, but it probably would be good for the Dem nomination process to have the early primaries in more diverse states.

What a week for Donald Trump. House Democrats finally got their hands on his tax returns. Judge Aileen Cannon has been ordered by the 11th Circuit to dismiss the documents case in her court and put an end to the “special master” delay tactic. The two top Oath Keeper guys were found guilty of seditious conspiracy. It looks like testimony in the tax fraud trial in Manhattan is about to wrap up. The dinner with Ye and Nick Fuentes is still making headlines because they are all walking freak shows who won’t shut up. And there’s this, which has been under-covered —

A federal judge has ordered former top Trump White House lawyers to provide additional grand jury testimony, rejecting former President Donald Trump’s privilege claims in the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of his effort to overturn the 2020 election, people briefed on the matter said.

Pat Cipollone, the Trump White House counsel, and his deputy, Patrick Philbin, appeared in September before the grand jury in Washington, DC, as part of the Justice Department probe, which is now being overseen by newly appointed special counsel Jack Smith.

Cipollone and Philbin declined to answer some questions at that time, citing Trump’s claims of executive and attorney-client privilege.

And to state the obvious, DOJ’s decision to fight Cipollone & Philbin’s executive privilege claims shows they are moving like a freight train directly at Donald Trump.

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) December 2, 2022

The Republican Party probably hasn’t hit bottom yet, but it’s getting closer. The Ye – Alex Jones interview, in which Ye revealed himself to be a Hitler fanboy, ought to be a huge embarrassment for the entire right-wing media-political infrastructure. Tucker Carlson made Ye a right-wing hero. The GOP had turned Ye into some kind of poster boy for Black People Who Support Trump. (The sub-context being see? we aren’t racists!) That’s all blowing up in their faces now. Jewish groups are demanding that the GOP cut all ties with Ye, which I assume they will do. They need Jewish votes more than they need the 6.2 Black Voters who might have changed parties because they are Ye fans.

Ye himself is, obviously, a massively screwed up person who needs to be under psychiatric supervision a lot more than he needs to be in a media spotlight. I hope he gets the help he needs now that he’s probably about to become persona non grata in right-wing media. But unless he is psychotic being screwed up mentally is no excuse for anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial.

At The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein says the Republican party may be at a cross roads regarding its extremist supporters. Many GOP politicians were slow to respond to the Ye-Fuentes-Trump debacle. Now some of them seem to want to re-erect old barriers between the far-right fringe and the party mainstream, but others are reluctant. Without the White and Christian nationalists, who else is going to vote for them?

Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Trump who focused on domestic extremism, told me she believes the backlash—however belated—combined with the GOP’s disappointing performance in last month’s midterm elections, could mark a turning point. “I think we are going to be playing footsie with fascism and authoritarianism and extremism for a while,” because it helped Trump win the presidency in 2016 and sustain his support thereafter, she said. But, she added, after several years of feeling “very pessimistic” about the prospect of weakening those movements, “this is the first time I’ve felt there might be some light at the end of the tunnel.”

Yet others remain unconvinced that the GOP is ready to fundamentally break with Trump or ostracize the coalition’s overtly racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic white supremacists and Christian nationalists. “I think what we are looking at is the entrenchment of extremism, and that’s what is so worrisome,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.

If anything, extremist groups could gain momentum in the coming months. Musk’s proposed mass amnesty for banned Twitter accounts would provide “a tremendous amount of oxygen to extremists on the radical right” and allow those groups to push back much harder against any Republican elected officials resisting their presence in the party, Michael Edison Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project told me. If Musk opens the door to extremist organizing on Twitter, Hayden said, the white-nationalist presence in the GOP coalition will become “potentially irreversible in the short term.”

I suspect Greenblatt and Hayden are calling this right. The next couple of years are going to be interesting.

Jennifer Rubin also has a good column, The MAGA cult should face facts: America will never be theirs ‘again.’

Right-wing media commentators and MAGA politicians have one thing right: The cultural tide of pluralism, secularism and feminism has washed away their imagined reactionary paradise of a White Christian America. Unfortunately, they fail to realize this trend is irreversible.

Republicans have been invested in the “culture war” for decades now. And they’re losing. They’re stuck with defending many positions that were winners for them in the past but aren’t any more — opposition to legal abortion, opposition to same-sex marriage, opposition to “virtually anything that smacks of racial justice,” Rubin says. As a result, they are at odds with the overwhelming majority of Americans on most social issues. And that’s not going to change.

But they are stuck in dependency with the White Christian Nationalists and the various other fringe crazies who like to pretend they are freedom fighters and warriors for the revolution.

(Their real problem is that they are leading meaningless lives and are not nearly as privileged and admired as they think they ought to be. One of the best things I’ve read this week is “Why Did the Oath Keepers Do It?” by Tom Nichols at The Atlantic, which I can’t get to today without starting up another subscription. Which I don’t want to do. But give it a try and see if they’ll let you read it.)

In the meantime, what might really shake up the political landscape is if Trump finally is tried and convicted of something, and that’s looking more possible all the time.

Yesterday the Senate passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which provides protection for same-sex marriages from the corrupt Supreme Court. These twelve Republicans voted with the Dems: Roy Blunt (Mo.), Richard Burr (N.C.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Susan Collins (Maine), Joni Ernst (Iowa), Cynthia M. Lummis (Wyo.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rob Portman (Ohio), Mitt Romney (Utah), Dan Sullivan (Alaska), Thom Tillis (N.C.) and Todd C. Young (Ind.).

Roy Blunt is about to be replaced by Eric Schmitt. I never liked Blunt, but Eric Schmitt is a walking shit show. And the Kansas City Star has turned up something suspicious about him. The KC Star tends to be behind a paywall, so I’m linking to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch here:

The newspaper reports that Schmitt’s state office claims to have no travel expense records for Schmitt since 2020, even though he clearly was traveling during that time. If the taxpayers funded it, they have a right to the details. If his Senate campaign or its supporters funded it, that would seem to be evidence that Schmitt was in fact using his state office to campaign for the Senate. As if further proof was needed.

[Update — the Oath Keepers are guilty! Stewart Rhodes and four co-defendants just got found guilty by the jury.]

The fallout from Trump’s Dinner With Fuentes continues. I didn’t think it was that much of a departure from his past behaviors to have caused this much of a ruckus. At TPM Josh Marshall posts a letter from a reader who argues that this wouldn’t have been a big deal before the midterms. TPM notes that a right-wing group called the Zionist Organization of America, which has supported Trump all along, is now shocked (!) over his association with Fuentes. The TPM reader comments,

Now? Now they turn on Trump? Oh yeah, it was a bridge too far to be with West and Fuentes. Give me a break. Even Michael Oren figured this out 3 years ago. They smell the stench of a loser on him just like some of these others, that’s all. There are tons of ex-neoconish Republicans out there who are the hard core of #NeverTrump who are so exactly because of his constant footsie playing with antisemites, among other things. It’s not like this was some massive deception we are only now awake to.

Trump’s dinner has been criticized by some Republicans but not other Republicans. The other Republicans tend to be those who might challenge Trump for the nomination in 2024, and also Herschel Walker, who is still in campaign mode and arguing that the use of pronouns decreases military readiness. The other Republicans have either said nothing or else released some boilerplate rhetoric condemning anti-Semitism without naming Trump. Or else they blame Trump’s staff, not Trump. For example,

Among those Republicans who have been silent on the matter so far, the most conspicuous is Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, where the dinner took place. DeSantis is often eager to jump into national political controversies. But he’s also Trump’s rival for control of the Republican Party and eager to court (and win) the former president’s supporters.

Further,

You’ll notice, in all of this, that while Republicans are willing to condemn Fuentes and Ye and Trump’s decision to eat dinner with them, they are not willing to go so far as to draw any conclusions about Trump himself. Even Pence — who had, in this group, the strongest words for Trump — took care not to impute any malice to his former boss. “I don’t believe Donald Trump is an antisemite. I don’t believe he’s a racist or a bigot,” he said. “I think the president demonstrated profoundly poor judgment in giving those individuals a seat at the table.”

Republicans who might want to run for office in the future can’t piss off Trump or his base. They don’t want to totally alienate anti-Semites or White supremacists, either. Sometimes they have to say something, but they have to make statements bland and fuzzy enough so that various factions can hear in them what they want to hear.

I honestly didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was until last week. Have you caught some of the videos of him ranting about how white male Catholics should rule the world? What a pathetic, whiny little man-baby. He and pathetic, whiny man-baby Trump probably did hit it off. Peas in a pod.

The irony here is that in spite of all their long-standing criticism of identity politics, it’s the Republicans who are pretty much exclusively practicing identity politics. It’s all about catering to various factions of bigots and signaling to them that the party is on their side against those other people.

See also Greg Sargent, How Trump is handing white supremacists huge propaganda victories.

So Trump had the entertainer formerly known as Kanye West plus White supremacist/anti-Semite/Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes as dinner guests at Mar-a-Lago this week. Much hand-wringing and pearl-clutching ensued. I’m struggling to understand why anyone would find this remarkable, given that it’s Trump we’re talking about, but apparently some do.

Ye, who has announced he is running for President, reported that he asked Trump to be his running mate. Whether this was meant to be a jest I do not know, but of course Trump does not comprehend “humor.” “Trump started basically screaming” and told Ye he would lose.

By several accounts Fuentes had not been invited but was allowed in because he came with Ye. And Trump found Fuentes completely captivating. As Zack Stanton and Garrett Ross write at Politico, “The quickest way to DONALD TRUMP’s heart is flattery: Say nice things about him, and you’re in.” Trump’s advisers were aghast.