The story thus far — the 2020 general election was held on November 3. According to a timeline at the National Archives, the states had until December 8, more than a month, to resolve controversies surrounding the election. And then on December 14 the electors met in their states to cast their votes for president. After that time, all legal challenges to the election are supposed to be over. As a nation we were past the “speak now, or forever hold your peace” part of the ceremony.

The epic, unhinged meeting at the White Mouse with Trump and the crazies and White House staff shrieking at each other for hours happened on December 18. It must have been impressed upon Trump that there would be no more court challenges of the election. So the Looney Tunes showed up to present alternative ideas, including using the military to seize voting machines. But at the end of the day, all the crazy ideas (that we know of) were shot down.

The epic meeting from Crazy ended about midnight on December 19. And then, some time later in the night of December 19, probably pumped on adrenalin and Adderall, Trump tweeted for his supporters to come to Washington on January 6, the date Congress was to confirm who won the presidential election. This is, apparently, when the idea of a massive rally of Trump supporters who would menace Congress in some manner was hatched. Being able to encite his supporters into doing something menacing was the one superpower Trump had left.

I also want to point out that the fake electors scheme was put into place before the meeting from Crazy, obviously, because the fake electors cast their fake votes on the same day the real electors met, December 14. So there was already a scheme in the works to hand the election back to Trump by fraudulent means.

I guess the plan still needed something that could be used as an excuse to throw the real electoral votes into doubt — like, you know, evidence — which the Trumpers did not have. And they were out of “normal” options, like going through the courts. But maybe a violent mob would create enough chaos that the real votes could be thrown out, and no one would notice. It was crude, but there weren’t many options left, especially after the proposal to seize the voting machines had been shot down.

Yesterday’s House January 6 hearing brought out that timeline. It also highlighted how extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys threw themselves into the project of menacing Congress on January 6.

As yet no one has presented any direct, personal communication between Trump and these hard-right militant organizations, but they were willing co-conspirators nonetheless. And there is evidence that there was communication between Trump allies and the militants. There is no doubt that Trump both anticipated and incited violence. The militant organizations planned and executed an on-the-ground strategy that drew in “normies” who had just come for the rally and cranked that violence up for maximum effect.

Jason Van Tatenhove, a former associate of the Oath Keepers, testified yesterday that Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes has long desired to be recognized as a powerful paramilitary leader, and he saw Trump and Trumpism as a means to that end.  Organizing for Trump was a path to more power and legitimacy, Van Tatenhove said.

I thought the testimony of Stephen Ayres, who had been one of the rioters who was not part of any militant organization, was especially effective. Ayres may not have been a Proud Boy or Oath Keeper, but he had been sucked into the social media vortex and believed that Trump had been robbed of his second term. He entered the Capitol and at one point was livestreaming from the Senate chamber. He was arrested on January 25, 2021, and earlier this year he pleaded guilty to disorderly and disruptive conduct. He testified yesterday that as a result of the notoriety he lost his job and had to sell his home. He said if he had known there was no evidence of election fraud he might not have gone to Washington. One suspects he is very sorry he did.

But of course, it wasn’t just Trump who made the Big Lie look like a legitimate concern. See Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman:

This dereliction included the studied silence of countless elected Republicans. But it also included the noise made by GOP politicians such as Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.), who led an effort to object to Biden’s electors on Jan. 6.

And, of course, a reversal is not possible. Even if someone proved tomorrow that the election had been stolen from Trump, that doesn’t mean he’d get the keys to the White House back.

“We have, quite honestly, Trump supporters who actually believe that we are going to overturn the election,” Lesko said. “And when that doesn’t happen, most likely will not happen, they are going to go nuts.”

Please feel free to comment before, during, and after today’s hearing.

NBC News is quoting Jamie Raskin that Pat Cipollone more or less corroborated what Cassidy Hutchinson said.

“Cipollone has corroborated almost everything that we’ve learned from the prior hearings,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in an exclusive interview just hours before the next hearing. “I certainly did not hear him contradict Cassidy Hutchinson. … He had the opportunity to say whatever he wanted to say, so I didn’t see any contradiction there.”

Okay, make of that what you will.

Update: So, the march to the Capitol was planned in advance but not announced in advance because it was supposed to seem spontaneous. And also it was not announced in advance, and no permits were acquired, because Trump’s lawyers believed it would be viewed as incitement to riot. Which it was. Of course, it wasn’t exactly a surprise, either, but it was not “official.”

Update: At one point today, Liz Cheney said, “President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child.” In my experience, people who have to work for someone who is seriously out of whack tend to fall into patterns of accommodating the out-of-whackness in ways that make absolutely no sense. But if the boss is, basically, a toddler in an adult body, people working with him — who can’t get out of working with him — will instinctively fall into patterns of treating this person like a toddler who, unfortunately, can’t be given time outs.  So the behavior is both tolerated and worked-around when necessary.

And nobody is going to go public with this as long as they intend to or have to keep working with him. As we see with some of these people, like Mike Pence, even after the relationship is over it may be hard to come forward and explain “This is what I did when working with this person.”

And it’s also the case that people with more casual contact with the wackadoo will be in denail about how off the charts this person really is.

Update: And what about that December 18 Oval Office meeting? Bits of this had been made public before, of course. We knew that Giuliani et al. had pushed for having the military seize voting machines. I’m sure I heard somewhere else that Sidney Powell almost maybe sorta kinda was given some kind of special counsel status. We didn’t know that the meeting moved all over the White House, ended up in the residence until about midnight, and featured arguing, yelling, and invitations to duke it out.

Update: And Liz has put The Donald on notice about witness tampering. The big toddler doesn’t like to be told “no.” He won’t stop.

Tomorrow’s January 6 hearing will begin at 1 pm EST, the latest news said. Originally it  was going to be in the morning. As I understand it, this hearing will be led by Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), and it will focus on the pre-insurrection rally.

Update: The website Just Security has a Chart Tracking Trump’s Knowledge and Intent in Efforts to Overturn the Election.

Update: This isn’t new, but I’m just now finding out about it. “Former President Trump and his adult children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., are scheduled to testify under oath on July 15 as part of a probe by the New York attorney general into his finances, a court filing revealed Wednesday.”

Update: A Fulton County Superior Court Judge has ruled that Lindsey Graham has to respond to the subpoena issued by District Attorney Fani Willis’s grand jury.

Let’s see if I’ve got the story straight — in late April, Elon Musk signed a contract to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share. He offered to pay $43 billion for it. Musk thought he could make Twitter more profitable than it is. He also called himself a “free speech absolutist” and dropped big hints that he wouldn’t censor anybody or block accounts because they wrote outrageous things, which made Musk a hero on the Right.

Most people thought Musk was nuts and that he’d be better off putting his money into more charging stations for his electric cars. Most people thought that attempting to run an uncensored Twitter would be a galaxy-class headache. There was also much weeping and wailing over the possible death of Twitter as a reasonably useful social media platform, because Musk was expected to screw it up.

Since April the deal has been off again, on again. I confess I haven’t followed the saga that closely and don’t know what all the problems were; nor do I care.

Now Elon Musk has decided he does not want to buy Twitter. Part of the reason for that may be that tech stocks, including Twitter stock, have dropped like a rock since April. Twitter stock as I write this is $36.81. But Musk is still locked into that $54.20 share price. Not a good deal.

Musk is making noise about Twitter misleading him about how many Twitter users are actually bots. Some observers think this is just an issue Musk is trying to use to break the contract. Twitter is determined to make Musk stick to the contract.

Alex Kirshner wrote at Slate,

Musk started searching for ways to not buy Twitter at $54.20 per share. His fundamental problem was that he had signed a contract to buy Twitter for that amount, and that contract, according to most qualified people who looked at it, gave him almost no wiggle room to exit the deal before closing. Absent proof that Twitter had misled him in a major way—one that had a “material adverse effect” on the company’s value, a high standard to meet—he would need to pay a $1 billion breakup fee to walk away. And even that might not do it, as the contract established that Twitter could take Musk to court and try to get a judge’s order to make him pay every red cent of his $44 billion bid.

Musk had his answer: He did not want to buy Twitter for what he agreed. But he needed a question that could make that answer work in public and in court, and his lawyers settled on, “Hey, Twitter. How many fake accounts do you really have?” Twitter has estimated that less than 5 percent of its users are fake accounts or bots. The company has been transparent (including, recently, CEO Parag Agrawal doing a big thread about it) that the 5-ish percent figure is just its best estimate. Musk has kept raising the subject. In June, Twitter gave Musk a big ol’ chunk of tweet data, nominally so he could do his own investigating but really so that he’d have less of an opening to claim, in service of nuking the deal, that Twitter was withholding crucial information. And you will never believe this, but it is now July, and Elon Musk’s camp is still claiming that Twitter has not gone along with his fact-finding mission about spam.

Sounds about right. And Musk will probably spend a ton of money on lawyers before he finally bites the bullet and pays the $1 billion to Twitter.

And now Trump has turned on Musk, calling him a bullshit artist. I can’t tell if this is because Musk not buying Twitter after all or because he said publicly recently that he never voted for a Republican. Trump had believed Musk was one of his voters. So I guess Musk isn’t the sweetheart of the MAGA crowd any more.

Here are a couple of articles to read together.

The first is by Mark Leibovich at The Atlantic, The Most Pathetic Men in America. Want to guess who it’s about? This is a nice piece of writing, btw. If you run into a subscription firewall, try opening it in a a private or incognito window in your browser.

It begins by explaining that the only place Trump would ever eat out while in Washington was in his hotel down the street from the White House.

Each night, assorted MAGA tourists and administration bootlickers would descend on the atrium bar on the small chance they’d get to glimpse Trump himself in his abundant flesh—like catching Cinderella at the castle, or Hefner at the mansion.

The hotel gave every impression of being a tight and well-managed operation, in contrast to the proprietor’s side hustle down the street. Lots of Washington reporters would hang around the establishment, too. We could always pick up dirt that Trump and his groveling legions tracked in. The place was crawling with them, these hollowed-out men and women who knew better. You might catch Rudy rushing out to smoke a cigar, red wine staining his unbuttoned tuxedo shirt (that was the night of the Mnuchin wedding, I think). Or see Trump’s favorite pillowy-haired congressmen—fresh off their Fox “hits”—greeting the various Spicers, Kellyannes, and other C-listers who were bumped temporarily up to B-list status by their White House entrée.

But the guests who stood out for me most were Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy and the busybody senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham. 

Apparently these two liked to work the room and brag about all the good things they were doing for their president. They “proved themselves to be essential lapdogs in Trump’s kennel,” Leibovich writes.

“You know what I liked about Trump?” Graham asked last month during a speech at a Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Nashville. “Everyone was afraid of him. Including me.” Laughter!

That’s … pathetic. Frankly, I can imagine some Nazi hanger-on saying the same thing about Hitler, ca. 1932. Of course Trump is pathetic, and Leibovich gives us some rich paragraphs describing how pathetic Trump is before turning back to Graham and McCarthy.

It’s been said before, but can never be emphasized enough: Without the complicity of the Republican Party, Donald Trump would be just a glorified geriatric Fox-watching golfer. I’ve interviewed scores of these collaborators, trying to understand why they did what they did and how they could live with it. These were the McCarthys and the Grahams and all the other busy parasitic suck-ups who made the Trump era work for them, who humored and indulged him all the way down to the last, exhausted strains of American democracy.

The bottom line, as described by Leibovich, is that these two crave relevance. They want to be in the center of things; they want to be in the room where it happens. And once Trump became the center of power in Washington, those two were drawn in like moths to a lamp. “There was always a breathless, racing quality to both men’s voices when they talked about the thrill ride of being one of Trump’s ‘guys,'” Leibovich writes. At one point he asked McCarthy about his “legacy,” and McCarthy shows him photos of himself with various celebrities. One gets the impression that service and accomplishment are alien concepts to these two.

Again, this is a great piece of writing and worth reading. But the other piece is at the New Yorker — again, you can read an article or two every day using private or incognito windows, which is how I read it. And this is by Jonathan Chait, Scenes From the Republican Surrender to Trump.

This article is a review of a book by Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell. Miller is a writer and political consultant who has worked for “normal” Republicans, people like John McCain, John Huntsman, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush. Unlike some others he was a never-Trumper all along and left the Republican party at some point. But it took him a couple of years after Trump’s election to do so. Chait:

After concluding his self-examination, Miller turns his lens onto several of his colleagues whose breaks with Trump took longer, or, in some cases, did not occur at all. He finds a subtle blend of rationalizations. And while the specifics of every Trump-supporting Republican differ, one motif of his subjects is a failure to summon the imagination and moral courage to break free from their career path and social identity. By the time you have attained a job in Republican politics that carries enough influence to matter, you have enough at stake professionally and socially that truly abandoning the party becomes as difficult to imagine as a fish leaving the water for land.

That sounds right. If being a Republican insider is the thing you’ve built your adult life around, and from which you draw most of your self-identify, walking away from that must seem like suicide. So they don’t walk away. They adapt.

Perhaps the most surprising factor Miller identifies in his subjects, very much including himself, is their profound cynicism. One would expect any seasoned political operative to exhibit some level of detachment from their field given that the work inevitably requires sanding down complex truths into slogans and taglines. But Miller reveals that he and his colleagues considered the whole enterprise fundamentally bullshit. Nearly to a person, they thought of politics as a game, and they considered the absence of ethics a mark of sophistication.

And I don’t doubt the same is true of some Democrats; I hope not all of them. But it was that cynicism that made the rise of Trump possible. It’s all bullshit, so just go with the flow.

One doesn’t need to see these Republicans as monsters to grasp their untrustworthiness. Miller presents them as achingly human. It is their humanness that renders them so terrifyingly weak and vulnerable in the face of evil. The only thing standing between the Republican Party and a second death blow is a soft pink wall of timorous apparatchiks. Miller’s tell-all should make us far more afraid.

Hannah Arendt got it, or got close to it.

“For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.” ? Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

I’m not sure whether it’s a failure to think as much as a failure to give a shit about anything beyond one’s personal ambitions, although maybe that’s the same thing.

Now I’m thinking about Josh Hawley, a man who must have a brain but who has chosen to check it at the door because brains aren’t in now, you know? Hawley would give himself a lobotomy if it would make him president. Possibly he’s done that already.

And speaking of banality, get a load of Eric Schmitt’s television campaing ad —

Missourians want a fighter in the U.S. Senate and I’m taking a blowtorch to Biden’s socialist agenda. #MOSen pic.twitter.com/N2vjPPoh2P

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) July 5, 2022

If machine gunning corn fields on television worked for Eric Greitens in 2016, why not?  It’s not like any of these people have any clue how to solve the nation’s problems. They just want to be relevant.

They got Sonny for good this time.

First, some housekeeping: The January 6 panel has a “deal” for an interview with Pat A. Cipollone, which seems to be that he will testify only behind closed doors. Better than nothing.

The next hearing will be televised Tuesday morning, July 12.

The Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury investigating Trump’s election fraud has subpoenaed Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Cleta Mitchell, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis, and Lindsay Graham. I hope they have a witness waiting room with padded walls. Graham is fighting the subpoena. And see What Lindsey Graham Did In Georgia To Keep Trump In Power at TPM.

Now on to new news — in 2020, I believe a lot of people voted for Joe Biden for POTUS because they were exhausted with the endless Trump drama and just wanted some normal. That’s very understandable. However, we don’t live in a normal country or in normal times. And even Joe Biden cannot provide enough warmth, comfort, and reasonableness to make it so.

Today’s links:

From Politico, ‘Be absolutely furious’: Dems want more from Biden after Highland Park. The takeaway: Biden is not rising to the moment. He’s not reflecting the mood of Democrats, which is angry. Very angry. People don’t want to hear the Preisdnet console them by saying we did just pass a gun bill. They want fire and brimstone.

Ashley Parker and Matt Viser write at WaPo, As some Democrats grow impatient with Biden, alternative voices emerge. In contrast to Biden, they write,

J.B. Pritzker, Illinois’ Democratic governor, delivered a fiery response that took direct aim at those blocking gun control legislation. “If you are angry today, I’m here to tell you to be angry,” he said, seething while Biden was consoling. “I’m furious. I’m furious that yet more innocent lives were taken by gun violence.”

There are multiple headlines right now about how Democrats are angry, about guns, about abortion, about Republicans, and President Biden is just not reflecting what they feel.

Of course, it’s also the case that (in some quarters) Democrats are not among the group privileged to be angry. The Daily Beast is running an article headlined Democrats Abroad Slammed for ‘Kavanaugh’s a C*nt’ July 4 Party, in which a bunch of American abroad gathered to express their anger in front of the Place du Trocadéro, the monument to the dead of World War I, in Paris. I’m not sure what Justice Kavanaugh’s many character flaws have to do with World War I, but naturally righties are making a Big Deal out of it, like they would never, ever associate some vulgarity with a politician they don’t like. Right?

Anyway — I do wish we had someone able to fight fire with fire. The Republic is under attack. The usual political processes no longer work. A lot of voters don’t get how Dems could hold the House, Senate, and White House and still be blocked from accomplishing much. In a normal world Joe Manchin wouldn’t have veto power over his own party.

But, yes, I think Democrats need to own their anger again.

The 4th of July felt bittersweet even before the news of the mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois. The “person of interest” alleged shooter — I don’t know if he’s been upgraded to “suspect” yet — seems to be one of those perpetually adolescent, useless, pissant young men we seem to produce a lot of these days. In an earlier age he would have gotten a job in some factory instead of making mediocre rap videos on the Internet. That might have kept him out of trouble.

Also in Illinois, the Republican nominee for governor, Darren Bailey, did not exactly handle the news about Highland Park gracefully. After leading some supporters in prayer, he said, “Let’s move on and celebrate the independence of this nation.”

People weren’t ready to move on. Bailey got slammed up one side and down the other.

The Bailey-Pritzker general election contest came about in part because incumbent governor J.B. Pritzker helped him win. The Chicago Tribune explained, “His victory was assisted by more than $40 million in advertising by Pritzker and the Pritzker-supported Democratic Governors Association, which ran ads attacking Irvin while labeling Bailey as ‘too conservative for Illinois.'” Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin was considered the front runner in the GOP primary for a while.

But you should see the ad the Democrats paid for; it accused him of being “100 percent pro life” and “protecting gun owners and the second amendment.” And Bailey got Donald Trump’s endorsement and “stands with the Trump agenda.” It used language to appeal to right-wing voters, in other words, even while presenting itself as an anti-Bailey ad. Richard Irvin saw the nomination slipping away and accused Democrats of “interfering” in the race. Bailey won easily.

J.B. Pritzker reckoned that Bailey would be the easiest of the Republican candidates to beat in the general, so he helped Bailey win. Pritzker may be right. Bailey has no discernible personality and apparently isn’t the sharpest crayon in the box. Let’s hope; if Bailey wins Illinois will be stuck with a right-wing nudnick as governor.

I hope you enjoy the 4th of July.

Summer Concepcion, Talking Points Memo, Jan. 6 Panel Members Say New Witnesses Have Come Forward After Hutchinson’s Testimony.

Dan Balz, Washington Post, Why Republicans should be nervous about their candidates for governor

Dana Milbank, Washington Post, Et tu, Alito? Murder of stare decisis creates legal circus maximus.

Jamelle Bouie, New York Times, Will Reactionaries Impose a Red-State Social Order on the Rest of Us?

Today’s cartoon —

These past few days have been really discouraging. The one bright spot has been that the January 6 committee is deliving on what was promised.

The Washington Post editorial board thinks that We can no longer avoid a criminal investigation into Donald Trump.  The Baltimore Sun editorial board says Prosecute Donald Trump: Evidence of criminal intent too damning to ignore. David Rohde writes at The New Yorker that A Potential Criminal Prosecution of Donald Trump Is Growing Closer. See also the Boston Globe editorial board.

We can dream.