Or, Impeached Again! Way to go, Donnie!

Yesterday I asked whether the Republican establishment would cut the Don loose or double down on the crazy. The answer appears to be the former. Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write at Axios that Top Republicans want Trump done — forevermore. “Top Republicans want to bury President Trump, for good,” they write. “But they are divided whether to do it with one quick kill via impeachment, or let him slowly fade away.”

There are stories from multiple sources that Mitch McConnell more than likely will vote to convict. Other Republicans are fine with doing Trump in, but they don’t want to leave their fingerprints on the knife.

For the record, these House Repblicans voted to impeach: John Katko, NY; Liz Cheney, WY; Adam Kizinger, IL; Fred Upton, MI; Jaime Hettera Beutler, WA; Dan Newhouse, WA; Peter Meijer, MI; Anthony Gonzalez, OH; Tom Rice, SC; David Valadao, CA.

I’m not finding any news stories listing Democrats voting against impeachment. We still don’t know what the Senate will do.

But here’s an interesting bit, from Kaitlan Collins and Kevin Liptak, CNN:

Two sources told CNN Trump has said he is bringing Alan Dershowitz back after his stint defending Trump during the first impeachment proceedings. Trump has told people that Dershowitz’s defense of him on the Senate floor saved him during his last trial. Rudy Giuliani is also expected to be involved, though no concrete legal strategy had been cobbled together as of Wednesday morning, even though Trump was slated to be impeached within hours.

Several prominent figures from Trump’s last impeachment — including Jay Sekulow and Kenneth Starr — have declined to get involved. The White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, is also not expected to play a role, and considered resigning in the wake of last week’s insurrection. Trump has been dismissive of Cipollone for months now.

See also NBC News:

Stripped of the ability to fire off real-time responses, Trump must rely on a White House staff that has largely been replaced with moving boxes as aides head for the exits and allies fail to offer a defense of him in public.

Are you tired of winning yet, Donnie?

Shane Goldmacher writes in the New York Times:

While all parties go through reckonings after losing power, the G.O.P. has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections and, for the first time since Herbert Hoover, ceded the White House, Senate and House in a single term.

That’s got to hurt.

I have no doubt Republicans are already looking to take Congress back in the midterms. Dems hold the houses by a hair, and the president’s party usually loses seats in midterm elections. Even so, I bet the Republican establishment right now wishes it had never heard the name “Donald Trump.”

The base, however, may not let them forget.

But the most acute danger for the health of the party, and its electoral prospects to retake the House and Senate in 2022, is the growing chasm between the pro-Trump voter base and the many Republican leaders and strategists who want to reorient for a post-Trump era.

“Have you heard what some of these folks waving MAGA flags are saying about Republicans?” said Representative Peter Meijer, Republican of Michigan, whose first days in Congress this month were marked by evacuations to escape from a mob. “They don’t identify themselves as Republicans.” …

… Some party leaders fret that as of now, they cannot win with Mr. Trump, and they cannot win without him. Right-wing voters have signaled that they will abandon the party if it turns on Mr. Trump, and more traditional Republicans will sour if it sticks by him.

It’s obvious to me that the Republican Party would be best off in the long run if it let Trumpism go and resigned itself to being in the wilderness for awhile. For one, the big donors have turned against Trumpism. It’s possible they would return in time, but for now they are clearly signalling they want the pre-Trump GOP back.

It’s also the case that the Trump base has revealed itself to be a tad, um, unstable, and not necessarily interested in the serious issue of protecting the wealth of the wealthy, which has been dear to the hearts of Republicans since McKinley. The GOP has long had to pull the scam of firing up the base with culture war issues — fighting racial integration, women’s lib, affirmative action, gay marriage, etc. — and pushing different issues in government policies — deregulation; tax cuts for the wealthy.  But QAnon is like an alien life form that keeps mutating out of control. There is no guarantee that it won’t work against the Republican Party in the future.

Paul Krugman:

… it would be a foolhardy prophet indeed who looked at the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and assumed that this time, under this pressure, the conservative coalition will finally break apart, sending the Republican Party deep into the wilderness and reshaping American ideological debates along new lines.

But breaking points do come, and the violent endgame of the Trump presidency has exposed a new divide in the conservative coalition — not a normal ideological division or an argument about strategy or tactics, but a split between reality and fantasy that may be uniquely hard for either self-interest or statesmanship to bridge.

The other problem for Republicans is that while it might be best for the party to move away from Trumpism, a whole lot of individual elected officials owe their relatively new careers to Trumpism. Will the likes of Josh Hawley or Marjorie Taylor Greene be willing to step away from the brink?

Of course, I’m also hoping that Democrats will use its majority to jump on election reform, and fast. No more voter suppression. And if they can do something about political gerrymandering that would be peachy.

It’s also the case that we haven’t yet gone through all of the fallout from the January 6 insurrection. Facts are still coming out. Today we learned that the FBI was given a stark warning about what would happen —

A day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit internal warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and “war,” according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post that contradicts a senior official’s declaration the bureau had no intelligence indicating anyone at last week’s pro-Trump protest planned to do harm.

Yet, obviously, preparations were not made. Requests for National Guard were denied six times while the riot was happening.  It appears that people in the Pentagon and in Homeland Security made a deliberate decision to let the insurrection take place. Possibly that’s not true, but that’s what it looks like. We need to know. It’s all still very muddy right now.

And there could still be more violence from Trump supporters, which would dig the hole for Republicans much deeper.

Oh, and Chad Wolf resigned in the middle of overseeing security for the inauguration. Way to go.

But back to the Republicans — This afternoon, the New York Times published a story by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman saying that Mitch McConnell is pleased about impeachment.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has told associates that he believes President Trump committed impeachable offenses and that he is pleased that Democrats are moving to impeach him, believing that it will make it easier to purge him from the party, according to people familiar with his thinking.

Interesting. And Liz Cheney says she will vote to impeach Trump. So these signs point to a break between the old guard and Trump. I can also see the possibility that the Trumpers could form a third party that would spllit the right-wing vote for awhile. We’ll see.

The House has new articles of impeachment drawn up. House Democrats also prepared a resolution calling on Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment. House Republicans objected to the latter measure. It may be voted on in the full House tomorrow. My understanding is that if Pence hasn’t invoked the 25th by Wednesday, the House will impeach. And the House Dems have the votes.

Of course, the Senate won’t remove Trump from office before he’s out anyway, but that doesn’t make the exercise pointless. But a post-term conviction, if obtained, would still be useful. “First, it gives the Senate the authority to prevent Trump from ever running again for federal office,” says Kevin Drum. “Second, it would rescind some of Trump’s perks of retirement, including his pension, office space, and government-paid staff.”

It would also force Senate Republicans to go on record one more time — are you with Trump, or are you with the United States?

Mike needs to face the reality that his political career is over. For once in his sorry ass life, he ought to do the right thing and invoke the 25th. I’m not holding my breath.

Josh Marshall:

One thought I keep returning to: if there were a functioning federal government we’d be seeing regular press conferences updating the public on on-going arrests, health status of the injured, progress of the investigation. As far as I can tell there hasn’t been a single one. Nothing from DOJ, FBI, Capitol Police, the Pentagon. Normally you might expect such information to be channeled through press conferences at the White House. But, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s not clear or perhaps too clear which side the White House is on.

It’s not like we’ve had much in the way of a functioning federal government for the past four years, of course. But now that most of the cabinet has resigned and gone home, political hacks/Trump loyalists are still in charge of most federal agencies, and Trump himself has stopped even going through the motions of being POTUS, which was all he ever did, we’re pretty much just drifting at this point. No one is really in charge of anything in Washington.

You may have missed this — on November 6, while we were distracted, Beijing moved to completely wipe out the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. There were mass raids and arrests. A lot of people will now disappear. Washington, of course, said nothing. One wonders what might have been if we’d had a functioning State Department in recent years, never mind a functioning federal government. Trump was always just faking being tough on China; he never really was. And Mike Pompeo has been more tuned in to domestic politics than anything going on beyond our shores.

Also, one suspects Beijing chose to move during our transitionless transition knowing there would be no response whatsoever from the U.S. Yesterday the State Department posted a tepid joint statement (with Australia, Canada, and the UK) opposing the crackdown, but that’s it in the way of a response from the U.S. And the joint statement doesn’t have Mike Pompeo’s name on it anywhere. It’s possible some assistant to an assistant released it, since no one else was doing anything.

We’ll be very lucky if China is the only foreign power to take advantage of our vulnerable state in the next ten days. And given the lack of cooperation with the transition from the Department of Defense, it may take the Biden Administration longer than usual to get up to speed on national security.

Again, though, we can ask if anyone has really been in charge of much of anything these past four years. Trump is less of a leader than a bullying and abusive head of household. Instead of doing their jobs, family members — people who had to report to him — learned that what they had to do to survive was not piss him off. This is one of the factors that hindered our pandemic response, I’m sure. For example, as I wrote in March, one of the several reasons we fell so far behind in testing is that the FDA sat on its hands and did not give independent labs permission to get to work. This would have been a routine thing to do in previous administrations. It appears Trump Administration officials have been afraid to breathe without  permission from Dear Leader. They didn’t dare even exercise their own authority.

Here’s a prescient column by Michael Gerson from February 2017, the very beginning of the fiasco:

In early January, House Speaker Paul Ryan met on the issue of tax reform with a delegation from the president-elect. Attending were future chief strategist and senior counselor Stephen K. Bannon, future chief of staff Reince Priebus, future senior adviser Jared Kushner, future counselor Kellyanne Conway and future senior policy adviser Stephen Miller. As the meeting began, Ryan pointedly asked, “Who’s in charge?”

Silence. …

… Trump has run a family business but never a large organization. Nor has he seen such an organization as an employee. “Trump,” says another former official, “is ill-suited to appreciate the importance of a coherent chain of command and decision-making process. On the contrary, his instincts run instead toward multiple mini power centers, which rewards competing aggressively for Trump’s favor.”

And while personnel came and went, that pattern didn’t change. This might not have been a total disaster if the person at the head, Trump, knew what he was doing and followed a consistent plan. But Trump is both ignorant and mercurial, and he doesn’t do plans. Schemes and scams, sure, but not not long-term, comprehensive planning. That’s way over his head. So, not only were there no consistent directions or cohesive policies coming from the White House, all the heads of agencies and departments were kept tied up in knots, afraid to act on their own in fear that any action would run afoul of whatever mood Trump was in at the moment.

That’s one reason I haven’t been critical of Joe Biden’s cabinet picks, by the way. Although I’ve seen a lot of grumbling on the Left about people not being progressive enough, what we’re going to need at the beginning is just plain old experience and competence. A lot of the agencies and offices and departments of the federal government are going to have to be rebuilt to make them functional again before anything else much gets done.

There is still a lot of investigating to do to determine why the many law enforcement and security agencies in and around Washington DC so utterly failed to protect the Capitol on Wednesday. I don’t blame the Capitol cops as much as I blame people higher up the security hierarchy who simply did not act to send reinforcents. Whether that was by design or simply because they didn’t want to piss off Daddy, I do not know. But it’s clear that something, probably a lot of somethings, just weren’t working as they were designed to work.

David Ignatius wrote in late December,

I realized I hadn’t heard anything about Rudy Giuliani for a couple of days. We know that even during the Wednesday afternoon putsch, and the hours after, he was calling and texting Republican lawmakers to get them to at least delay the certification of the Electoral College votes because there was more evidence! Real evidence this time!

The most recent Rudy news I could find was in the right-wing Washington Times.

President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani said Friday that he is surprised more people did not try to storm the U.S. Capitol during the deadly insurrection they both fomented this week.

Mr. Giuliani, who on Wednesday recommended “trial by combat” as way of resolving the presidential election decisively lost by Mr. Trump, voiced disbelief “so few” people seized the Capitol hours later.

Speaking to Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former aide, Mr. Giuliani also denied “Trump people” scaled the Capitol’s walls during the breach and baselessly laid blame on alleged outsider activists.

“Most of them hadn’t come there with implements to do it and also led on by people from, you know, groups that are experts at it. Believe me, Trump people were not scaling the wall,” Mr. Giuliani said.

“So there’s nothing to it that [Mr. Trump] incited anything,” Mr. Giuliani said on Mr. Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic” podcast.

It’s a bit remarkable that the Washington Times admitted that the claim that not-Trump-supporters were behind the putsch is “baseless.” Note also that Steve Bannon’s channels since have been removed from YouTube. There is also speculation that Rudy could face charges in connection with the riot. Otherwise, Rudy seems to have crawled under a rock somewhere.

For that matter, we haven’t heard much from Ivanka since she deleted a tweet that called the insurrectionists “patriots.” See also Emily Jane Fox, “The Stink of His Family Is Nearly Impossible to Get Off”: Jared and Ivanka’s Final Chapter in Washington Demolished Their Future at Vanity Fair. In brief, Javanka is now persona non grata among pre-2016 friends and associates. Ivanka was serious about launching her own political career, and after Wednesday let’s just say she’s got a way to go with that.

I was also curious about Kimberly Guilfoyle, last seen dancing in this video made just before the pre-putsch “rally.” She told us the best was yet to come, but I’m not sure Wednesday was what she had in mind.

True story: I couldn’t remember Guilfoyle’s name, so I googled “crazy woman who spoke at Republican convention” and she came right up.

Ben Carson! I occasionally wonder about Ben Carson. I worry that people forget to check on him to be sure he’s still breathing. But in the past few hours he and Donald Trump, Jr., have both criticized Twitter for the lifetime ban of The Donald. Ben Carson also let us know he is aware the U.S. is not China. Well, good on you, Ben! You’re learning world geography!

I don’t wonder about Eric. I don’t want to know about Eric.

Bess Levin at Vanity Fair reports that Hope Hicks is resigning, again, but not because of what happened on Wednesday. Hicks wants everyone to be clear about that. Her second resignation is just a scheduling thing.

I am sad to report that Tiffany Trump is doubling down on family loyalty.

The 27-year-old Georgetown law school graduate hopped on Twitter, a platform she hasn’t much used recently, to issue a series of messages and retweets that repeated his false allegations of election fraud and that blasted Twitter and Facebook for locking his accounts or for removing his content that was seen as promoting election disinformation and inciting violence.

Oh, Tiffany. You got a law degree, girl. In spite of your least-favorite-daughter status and being stuck with a name worthy of a strip-club headliner, you were on the way to making something of yourself and building a life apart from Trump, Inc. And there you go making another appeal for Dad’s Approval. So sad. He doesn’t love anyone, you know.

I also regret to report that Steve Mnuchin has not resigned yet. He’s going to stay on the job until they drag him out. His wife Louise has made a new movie in which her character eats a spider, it says here, so we can still see her, if we want to.

Steve and Louise in happier (for them) times.

Mike Pompeo is also sticking it out. He will be addressing the staff of Voice of America on Monday. VoA staff are pissed they are being required to broadcast the speech, which they consider propaganda. That’s our Mike.

Acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf, whom you might remember was all over Portland last summer but who somehow couldn’t be bothered to respond to the riot in the Capitol, did emerge from his secret bunker long enough to issue a tweet condemning the violence on Wednesday. Yeah, we’re not impressed, Chad.

Although she’s not an official part of the Trump Administration, I want to give a special shout-out to Ginny Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. She was a big online cheerleader of the “rally” on Wednesday. There are reports she sponsored 80 buses of insurrectionists that went to DC.  Since Wednesday she has been uncharacteristically quiet and, I understand, has even deleted her Facebook page.

Her husband might be concerned that if her involvement in the riots became widely known he might be pressured to resign. He might be right.

Excuse me while I free associate for a while.

Today I ran into a post by Ed Morrisey at Hot Air providing testimony that the November election results matched the Trump campaign’s internal polling on the eve of the election, with the exception of Georgia, which internal polls showed Trump winning. They all knew good and well that Trump was losing and no fraud was going on. This is not a surprise to me, but it’s a surprise to see it reported on Hot Air.

Back in the heyday of political blogs, Morrisey was Captain Ed, a reliably hard-Right voice in support of George W. Bush and against liberalism. He was in lock step with the likes of Power Line and Instapundit, if you recall those blogs. Hot Air is a website founded by Michelle Malkin. So it’s a bit disorienting to find Morrisey being honest about bad actors on the Right. I haven’t been following Morrisey, however, and I don’t know if he was a Trump supporter until recently.

This testimony about internal polling is significant because it is more evidence — like we needed more evidence –that Trump planned to steal the election by declaring himself the winner based on an election night lead and then using courts to stop the counting of mail-in votes. That plot was foiled when Fox News called Arizona for Biden on election night. Trump’s very narrow path to victory required Arizona and Pennsylvania, it says here. Note that Arizona and Pennsylvania were the hills Cruz, Hawley, et al. were still trying to take at the end.

According to a YouGov poll out today, 45 percent of Republican voters approve of the riot in the Capitol building. The same poll showed 68 percent of Republican voters do not consider the assault on the Capitol to have been a threat to democracy. This puts Republicans way out of step with Democratic and Independent voters. But it also tells us that 55 percent of Republican voters don’t approve of the attempted insurrection, and at least some of that 55 percent do think it was a threat to democracy. We can hope some scales fell from at least some eyes.

James Ford, a Zen teacher and Unitarian Universalist minister, cited the YouGov poll on Facebook and quoted Hannah Arendt: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” James continues,

What was believed as true has been revealed to be a lie. Here as the prince of the lies has been revealed for what he is.

Those 55 percent are at that place. That hard place.

They are being invited to see something about themselves. Personally, I am completely sympthetic. It is something we humans find terribly seductive. I’ve swallowed more than one lie in my life. …

…A painful thing. I know. I know. And. Most almost certainly will not succeed. It is too hard a thing.

But a door has opened.

That’s about how I felt when I saw Ed Morrisey’s post. Look at you, being all factual. What happened? I don’t expect Morrisey to stop being a lot more conservative than I am. But “conservative” doesn’t worry me. Reasonable people can reach different conclusions when they apply different values and philosophies to the same facts. In that case at least everyone is mostly dealing with facts, which hasn’t been the case for the U.S. political Right for some time. There’s a big difference between opposing views on tax policy and not living in the same time-space continuum.

Which brings me to former Missouri senator John Danforth. Danforth may be one of the last living old-school Republicans. Danforth was first elected to the Senate in 1976, a time when the GOP was splitting between the more ideological Goldwater-Reagan wing and the old eastern establishment, sometimes derided as the “Rockefeller Republicans.” As a Senator, Danforth was conservative, and I disagreed with a lot of his votes, but he was more pragmatic than ideological. He didn’t think in talking points. He was respected by reasonable people of both parties. He lived in the standard time-space continuum. And it’s significant that Danforth says today that campaigning for Josh Hawley to take his old seat was “the worst mistake I ever made in my life.”

I think Hawley has done irreparable damage to his political career. I could be wrong about that. Certainly, if you look at Missouri right now you might assume there is no limit to how far Right you can go and still win elections. My sense of things, though, is that the riot in the Capitol could end up being “movement conservatism’s” last hurrah. The pendulum that kept moving further and further Right, from Reagan to Gingrich et al. to Bush-Cheney-Karl Rove to the ascendance of Trump and the MAGA cult may be about to swing the other way. The powers that be on the Right are arrogant and greedy but not stupid; they must see they are on an unsustainable course, politically. The more grounded and traditionally conservative sensibilities of the old Republican establishment may come back into vogue and squeeze out the nutzoids. That would be a good thing.

And if that’s so, Josh Hawley just bet the mortgage money on the wrong horse.

A sign of the times: The Wall Street Journal is calling on Trump to resign. I agree with WSJ that the events of this week have probably finished Trump as a serious political figure. Yes, he still has a devoted following, but Trump probably never realized how much of his power derived from the consent of the Republican establishment and Murdoch media, not to mention the complicity of mainstream media to “normallize” him. If he loses most of that, and I believe he has, there’s no way he wins another presidential nomination. His influence within the Republican party could fade quickly.

And, frankly, this crew is not exactly a solid power base.

Let’s talk about the insurrectionists. They were dangerous, no question. There is evidence some of them were hoping to take hostages. Some of them might have hoped to seize and destroy the ballots. Somebody planted explosives. One security officer was killed by rioters who, as I understand it, smashed in his head with a fire extinguisher. There was vandalism. Offices were looted. Poop was smeared in hallways.

But most of them, once inside, seemed to be a loose ends. Why were they there? What did they expect? They issued no demands and made no statements other than to wave flags — American flags, Trump flags, Confederate flags. Some of them seemed to think this was a big lark, like the time they left a rubber snake in the teacher’s desk back in 6th grade. Like this guy:

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 06: A pro-Trump protester carries the lectern of U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi through the Roturnda of the U.S. Capitol Building after a pro-Trump mob stormed the building on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. Congress held a joint session today to ratify President-elect Joe Biden’s 306-232 Electoral College win over President Donald Trump. A group of Republican senators said they would reject the Electoral College votes of several states unless Congress appointed a commission to audit the election results. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Behold 36-year-old Adam Johnson, a father of five from Parrish, Florida.  And yes, this is what White privilege looks like. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that he’s commiting a crime. Felony? What felony?

At least the fellow who put his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk has been arrested. That’s a start. He is Richard Barnett, 60, from Gravette, Arkansas, and when he left the building he bragged about looting Nancy Pelosi’s office to the New York Times.

See When the Mob Reached the Chamber by Megan Garber at The Atlantic.

The glibness was its own display of dominance. Apathy can be its own kind of weapon. The images of the rioters that came from the Capitol yesterday conveyed glee and anger and many things in between; what they convey very little of, however, is fear. The insurrectionists grinned at the cameras. They waved, merrily. They shuffled through Statuary Hall as the frozen faces of America’s past looked on. They overran the place. And then they were escorted out, calmly—politely—by Capitol Police. They were fueled by lies and fantasies; one thing they got right, though, was that their attack on the government—an attack motivated by their desire to overturn a free and fair election—would incur very few consequences. By the evening, as newspapers ran all-caps headlines about the trauma the Capitol had just endured at the hands of militant invaders, law enforcement had reportedly arrested some 50 people. News networks that had spent years stoking violent delusions scrambled to announce their shock that the delusions had turned violent. Politicians who had demonized peaceful racial-justice protesters this summer found acrobatic new ways to define “law and order.”

Those rioters who returned home and expected a virtual hero’s welcome on social media found something else instead — claims that the riots were the work of antifa! See MAGA World Is Splintering by Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic.Tiffany spoke withTrump fan Bryson Gray, who had attended the insurrection but claims to have remained outside the Capitol Building.

“When I left the Capitol, I actually thought I was going to get on Twitter and see a bunch of support, because it was actually a very beautiful thing,” Gray said. Instead, he was met with a strange message spreading across the site: Trump fans weren’t behind the riots. Instead, it was antifa, the decentralized left-wing group that has become a bogeyman for Republican commentators and politicians, and for President Trump in particular. Many of Gray’s former #StopTheSteal allies had disavowed the insurrection, and a good number of them were using leftist antagonists as their scapegoat. “The first tweet I saw was somebody saying ‘Patriots don’t storm buildings; there were no patriots in the Capitol,’” Gray told me. “I’m like, Uh, that literally makes no sense; what are you talking about?”

I don’t disagree with Greg Sargent often, but today he writes that the insurgency scored a propaganda coup.

I am hopeful that most of the rioters who broke into the Capitol building will be identified, arrested, and convicted of something. And I am hopeful that they receive enough punishments to change their attitudes. Some of them have already lost their jobs. I am also hopeful that any government or security official who in any way colluded to make the insurrection happen will do penitentiary time. We’ll see.

See also David Graham, The Atlantic, The Insurrectionists Would Like You to Know That They’re the Real Victims.

As for Trump, I do hope the House impeaches him. Right now, it appears this will happen.

(As I was writing this, Nancy Pelosi let it be known that another impeachment is on the table. Keep reading for details.)

Today, Trump is holed up in the White House, largely cut off from the world. His social media accounts have all been suspended, at least for a while. There have been no official White House press releases for a couple of days. All we’ve heard from Trump in several hours is this:

…fight to ensure that only legal votes were counted. While this represents the end of the greatest first term in presidential history, it’s only the beginning of our fight to Make America Great Again!”

— Dan Scavino??? (@DanScavino) January 7, 2021

Dan Scavino is White House deputy chief of staff.

At Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley writes We’ve Lost Contact With the President.

The assumption underneath all of this, seemingly confirmed by a leaked Wednesday email in which Jared Kushner’s father told a friend that Trump’s actions are “beyond our control,” is that the president has gotten untethered; there is no longer anyone at all to mediate, even in a craven or enabling way, between his impulses and those of his most delusional, violent supporters. And with his social media accounts shut down, we lack even the usual level of awful access to the pattern of his thoughts. The man who is nothing but performance has been cut off from the audience that gives him shape and meaning.

What is the president doing? Is there a president right now, really? The safety line has gone slack in the cave, and we are all waiting to see what kind of thing will come back out.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported that Trump’s enthusiasm about the attack on Congress disturbed even his own staff. Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman writes that staffers were actually warned to stay away from Trump.

“What do I do? Resign?” one nervous White House staffer asked a friend on Wednesday afternoon, shortly after news broke that a woman had been shot and killed inside the Capitol. The West Wing staffer told the friend that White House Counsel Pat Cipollone was urging White House officials not to speak to Trump or enable his coup attempt in any way, so they could reduce the chance they could be prosecuted for treason under the Sedition Act. “They’re being told to stay away from Trump,” the friend said. The White House declined to comment.

Cipollone’s purported concern that Trump was committing treason—a federal crime—illustrates the chaos and fear of Wednesday’s unprecedented events. At least one staffer isn’t waiting to flee the ship. On Wednesday night, CNN reported that Stephanie Grisham, the former White House communications director and Melania Trump’s current chief of staff, resigned over the Trump-inspired riot. As staff quit or steer clear, Trump is increasingly isolated and alone. According to a person close to the White House, Trump refused to take calls on Wednesday from business leaders who wanted him to call off the insurrectionists. A former West Wing staffer said Republicans were texting and calling Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to lobby him to intervene, but Meadows wasn’t answering.

Gabriel also says Trump wanted David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler (our guys won! hurray!) to lose the Georgia runoff elections. Trump wanted to hurt Mitch McConnell for not supporting his attempt to overturn the election, and he believes that he will be the most dominant force in the Republican Party if McConnell loses party leadership. However, if anything, the events of yesterday supported McConnell’s continued leadership, even if it’s as Minority Leader. Trump is political kryptonite now.

Today there are resignations. The most significant of these, so far, is Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. I take it the break between Trump and Chao’s husband Mitch McConnell is irrevocable.

Today Chuck Schumer called for Trump to be removed from office immediately. I emailed my senators to let them know I support Schumer in this. And since one of my senators is Josh Hawley, I also told Hawley he was a disgrace and should resign. The Kansas City Star and St. Louis Post-Dispatch have not been kind to Hawley today, either.

And now I see Nancy Pelosi is calling for Trump to be removed from office immediately, too. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

The person who might do the job is Mike Pence, who has sole power to initiate removal procedures under the 25th Amendment. And Pence would be justified. I almost feel sorry for him now. See CNN’s Jim Acosta, Trump pressured Pence to engineer a coup, then put the VP in danger, source says.

On Tuesday, Pence came under intense pressure from Trump to toss out the election results during a meeting that lasted hours in the Oval Office. The vice president’s chief of staff, Marc Short, was banned by Trump from entering the West Wing, the source said, as the President repeatedly warned with “thinly veiled threats” to Pence that he would suffer major political consequences if he refused to cooperate.

And then Trump sic’d the mob on Pence.

Pence was joined by his wife Karen Pence, daughter Charlotte and brother, Rep. Greg Pence, R-Indiana, for the ceremonial counting of the electoral votes in Congress Wednesday. Several of the violent Trump supporters who were rampaging the US Capitol were heard screaming “where’s Mike Pence,” the source said, frightening the vice president and his family.

Yet, the President and his top aides barely lifted a finger to check in on Pence to make sure he and his family were unharmed, the source added.

If Pence refuses to act, another impeachment isn’t out of the question. Greg Sargent reports that Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are circulating new articles of impeachment. And this is what Nancy Pelosi said about it:

I join the Senate Democratic leader in calling on the Vice President to remove this president by immediately invoking the 25th amendment. If the vice president and the cabinet do not act, the Congress may be prepared to move forward with impeachment.

And there’s still time; as I recall, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment from start to acquittal in the Senate only took about a week. Sargeant says the position to just leave Trump alone until January 20 is becoming increasingly untenable.

Elsewhere: Anger that the Capitol was so easily broken into is growing. Chuck Schumer has promised to fire the Senate Sargeant-at-Arms as soon as he becomes Majority Leader. The House Sargeant-at Arms is under pressure to resign. There are multiple calls to thoroughly investigate the Capitol Police. The whole topic of how Capitol security failed, and how it almost certainly was compromised, requires a whole ‘nother post.

I am watching the news out of Washington about the thugs who have taken over the Capitol. And I keep hearing that there is still hardly any law enforcement trying to restore order. And we all know that if leftie or BLM protesters had done this, they’d be in jail already.

This is what comes of years of winking at right-wing terrorism. This is what comes of years not holding the Right responsible for bombing abortion clincis and murdering abortion doctors. This is what comes of letting armed thugs storm into statehouses and call it “exercising their rights.”

Right now I’m hearing some guy on the teevee downplaying the severity of what’s happening. It’s a “nuisance,” he says. He doesn’t think it’s a big enough deal to demand immediate deployment of National Guard.

This is bleeping insurrection. And if these thugs are just allowed to go home in a day or two, there will be more of it.

The Georgia runoff elections are tomorrow, although we may not know who won right away. I am making no predictions about winners. I will predict that if Republicans lose the Senate, the Republican establishment will blame Trump and his insane phone call to Brad Raffensperger for it.

It’s Wednesday that worries me. The good news is that as of this writing 20 Senate Republicans have made a firm commitment to certifying the Electoral College votes. There is no way there will be a majority vote in either house to not certify. And now that Trump’s stupid stunt of a phone call is public, I’d be a little surprised if any more GOP senators join the Dirty Dozen in voting to overturn the election.

But that doesn’t put us out of danger. For one thing, I fear all the right-wing crazies in America are going to show up in DC Wednesday, armed and looking for fights. The Proud Boys have announced that instead of their signature black and yellow garb they will wear all black clothes to mimic antifa. So that violence will be blamed on antifa? The Washington Post has reported “Threats of violence, ploys to smuggle guns into the District and calls to set up an ‘armed encampment’ on the Mall.” As I’ve said previously, it would be better if leftie protesters just stayed away. Let the thugs be thugs. It’ll be on teevee. The world will be watching.

A few days ago David Ignatius wrote that he was hearing from Washington officials who were worried that Trump would use the street violence he is actively inciting as an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act to mobilize the military. And this takes us to the next area of concern.

At Washington Monthly, David Atkins wonders what other phone calls Trump has been making that we don’t know about. And have any of those phone calls gone to generals?

Barely noticed in the hubbub surrounding the impeachable offense over Georgia’s election was this extraordinary letter from all ten living former defense secretaries, urging against involving the military in domestic election disputes….

… These statements should be shockingly self-obvious. So why did they need to be made? What is happening between Trump and the Pentagon that this would be necessary?

What, indeed?

Given Trump’s desperation to remain in power by any means necessary, his authoritarian instincts, his pretenses at military support, and his general assumption that all branches of the government work for him directly rather than the Constitution, it would be shocking if Trump were not attempting to force Pentagon officials into overthrowing democracy.

And indeed, if he weren’t doing so, why was the letter written? Why did every living former defense secretary sign it? Why did it mention explicitly the duties of the officials involved to respect and facilitate the transition of power?

It wasn’t long after the November election that Trump replaced senior administration officials at the Petagon with his own toadies. As recently as December 30, the Biden transition team was still complaining about being stonewalled by the Department of Defense and OMB. What are the toadies hiding?

I do not believe the heads of the armed services will touch this. But as we saw this summer in Portland and elsewhere, Trump is able to call up military-type “agents” from the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marshals Service, Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Protection Service, and elsewhere to conduct “police” actions that would have made Augusto Pinochet proud. And violence in the streets of the District of Columbia would give him an excuse to do so.

Yet there’s more. See Greg Sargent, A leading historian of U.S. democracy issues an urgent warning. Right now, since Democrats control the House, even if a majority of Senators were to vote to overturn the election, the effort would fail. But, Sargent asks, what might happen in a future election if Republicans hold a majority in both houses? A leading scholar of election history is warning that Republicans have shown they are willing to go down this path.

So, it’s not just Trump we have to worry about. And while Trump will be gone soon, all those Republicans willing to throw the Constitution under the bus will still be in office.

Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic,

This is sedition, plain and simple. No amount of playacting and rationalizing can change the fact that the majority of the Republican Party and its apologists are advocating for the overthrow of an American election and the continued rule of a sociopathic autocrat.

This is not some handful of firebrands making a stand for the television cameras. In 2005, one Democrat in the House and one in the Senate filed an objection to counting Ohio’s electoral votes, while insisting that they were not contesting the outcome of the presidential election itself. In 2017, a handful of Democratic members of the House objected to the electoral count. Because they lacked support in the Senate, then–Vice President Biden ruled the representatives out of order and declared, “It is over.” In both cases, the Democratic candidate had already conceded.

So, the “Democrats did it first” argument is bogus.

Instead of threatening to gavel these objections into irrelevance, as Biden did four years ago, Vice President Mike Pence “welcomes” these challenges. Pence’s career is finished, but he could have stood for the Constitution he claims to love and which he swore to defend. However, cowardice is contagious, and no mask was thick enough to protect Pence from the pathogen of fear.

It would be a relief, Nichols continues, to think that these officials all sincerely believe that Trump was robbed of an election.

But we are, in the main, dealing with people who are far worse than true believers. The Republican Party is infested with craven opportunists, the kind of people who will try to tell us later that they were “just asking questions,” that they were “defending the process,” and of course, that they were merely representing “the will of the people.” Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are not idiots. These are men who understand perfectly well what they are doing. Senator Mitt Romney sees it clearly, noting that his GOP colleagues are engaged in “an egregious ploy” to “enhance political ambition.”

And for this reason, there must be a reckoning. I still hear people say that once Trump is gone we should just “move on” for the “good of the nation.” Is that really what the nation needs? I say the nation needs to know the entire truth, and that those who protected Trump from the consequences of his corruption should be named and shamed, at the very least. Of course die-hard Trump supporters will go to their graves loving Dear Leader, but this is for posterity.

Whether Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon was the right thing to do is still debatable. But this is not Watergate. Carl Bernstein tells us that this GOP coup attempt is much worse. Those of us old enough to remember Nixon’s impeachment hearings should know this. “The heroes of Watergate were Republicans who would not tolerate Richard Nixon’s conduct,” Bernstein says. That’s hardly the case now.

Trump should be prosecuted for his attempt to overturn a lawful election, and every Republican in Congress supporting him now should also be called to answer for sedition. And let us have a moment of silence for Bill Barr, who must know the whole plot and chose to bail out of his role in it before the plot’s execution. You’ve got a lot of questions to answer, Bill.

We cannot just let this slide. Or it will keep happening.

See also:

Jennier Rubin, The Senate’s coup-staging ‘Dirty Dozen’ shouldn’t be allowed to hold office.

David Frum, Trump Crosses a Bright-Red Line

Richard Hasen, Donald Trump Should Be Prosecuted for His Shakedown of Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger

Marc Caputo, The backstory of Trump’s Georgia call

If you haven’t gone to WaPo to hear highlights of yesterday’s unhinged call from Trump to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, here it is. Trump tries to bully Raffensperger into changing the election result. You can hear the entire call at WaPo, and there’s also a transcript.

Here’s just a sample of Trump talking: