Month: June 2023

The Biden administration has been remarkably stable and almost completely free of scandal. By this point in Trump’s presidency, nine cabinet members had resigned, including three for “misuse of government funds for personal purposes.” Biden’s cabinet remains intact, with only chief of staff Ron Klain having stepped down from his position, and not under any ethical cloud. By comparison, “six Cabinet secretaries departed during Reagan’s first term, eight during H.W. Bush’s presidency, four during Clinton’s first term, two during W. Bush’s first term and three during Obama’s first term.”

As for Biden himself, there’s been no hint of questionable behavior. He hasn’t authorized torture, illegally invaded a country, or authorized illegal surveillance of American citizens. He hasn’t sold weapons to Iran to secretly fund an illegal war in Central America. He hasn’t even done anything comparable to the Clinton administration’s firing of travel office staff–a non-scandal if there ever was one.

This squeaky clean record must be frustrating for House Republicans, but they’re undeterred.

Between July and September, Republicans are slated to hear high-profile testimony from a trio of Biden Cabinet officials who have been top impeachment targets on the right: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Attorney General Merrick Garland. There’s also strong interest in hauling in David Weiss, the Trump-appointed US attorney who oversaw the criminal investigation into the president’s son, Hunter Biden, in an attempt to put the focus on Garland.

So, quick, off the top of your head, try to tell me what these three cabinet members have done to merit impeachment. Keep in mind that in the entire history of the country, only one cabinet member has ever been impeached, and he was acquitted. That case, from 1876, involved Secretary of War William Belknap who was indeed corrupt, but had already resigned. The House impeached him despite his resignation as they saw it as an effort at avoidance, but the Senate effectively decided the resignation meant they no longer had jurisdiction to carry out a trial. The Senate was wrong, of course, as they had the right to use impeachment to bar Belknap the right to ever serve in government again. The main point here, though, is that we don’t impeach cabinet members in this country even when they’re corrupt. They resign and that’s the end of it. To make an exception, we’d have to see something truly remarkable, yet we have to consult right-wing media to even know what Mayorkas, Wray and Garland are supposed to have done wrong.

My guess is Mayorkas didn’t enforce some immigration law to the House Republicans’ satisfaction, that Wray didn’t turn over a subpoenaed document in a timely or un-redacted enough manner, and Garland supposedly interfered with David Weiss’s probe of Hunter Biden. There’s zero chance that these accusations will result in a successful impeachment trial in the Senate. But apparently Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy believes he needs to allow impeachment votes to go forward to satisfy his right flank.

House Republicans are preparing to let the push for potential impeachment proceedings dominate their agenda over the next few months, as Speaker Kevin McCarthy faces growing pressure from an increasingly restive right flank eager to take aim at President Joe Biden and his Cabinet.

The increased focus on impeachment — with Biden’s attorney general and homeland security secretary the highest on the GOP’s list — underscores how Republicans are quickly shifting their focus to red-meat issues that could fire up their base, even as some in their conference are nervous about voter backlash over the more aggressive approach…

…After facing backlash from conservatives for cutting a debt limit deal with Biden and as the clock ticks toward the 2024 elections, McCarthy has started to warm up to the idea of impeaching a member of Biden’s Cabinet – whether it be Garland or Mayorkas or both, according to multiple sources familiar with this thinking. The move could win over some on his right flank.

When it comes time to authorize the appropriations bills for the next fiscal year, McCarthy will have to strike another deal with the Democrats, and his right flank will go crazy. He thinks letting them do some cabinet impeachments now is a prophylactic against their coming backlash over government spending, but that is pure delusion. The reality is that McCarthy doesn’t have the power he needs to do his job. Every move he makes is a desperation move, like putting fingers in a dike.

Howdy, howdy! It’s another midweek somewhere. Tonight’s selection is the title track from Brian Eno’s second solo LP, Taking Tiger Mountain. This would be a year before Eno would begin explicitly experimenting with what we know as ambient music. Some of the contours are already there.

Since I am not well-versed on the many nuances of music theory, I enjoyed (and still enjoy) discussing ambient music with people who actually study music theory for a living. A long time ago, I made some off the cuff statement within earshot of one of our university’s music professors about Eno’s more ambient work being right up there with the work of minimalists I’d heard. That definitely set the guy off. It was actually fun and enlightening to spend a good 15 or so minutes on the distinctions between art music (e.g., Steve Reich’s work) and popular music (which is where the likes of Eno would be categorized). Fair enough. Some get formal training in composition, and others may not even know how to formally write music. I did manage to squeeze in a question about whether the minimalists like Reich were intentionally blurring the lines between “art music” and “popular music”, although that question got pretty quickly dismissed. So it goes. I enjoy it all.

Peace and love.

Zachary Faria of the Washington Examiner is doing the work. His latest column is dedicated to trying to convince Republicans not to ruin a golden opportunity to win back the White House by backing Donald Trump as their 2024 presidential nominee. It’s interesting to see how he goes about it.

The main argument is statistical. He looks at President Joe Biden and  Vice-President Kamala Harris’s upside-down approval numbers, the widespread concern about Biden’s age, and the head-to-head polling numbers for matchups between Biden and Trump versus Biden and DeSantis. According to the polls he selected, DeSantis is about even with Biden and ahead by 11 points in key swing states while Trump is narrowly behind and tied in swing states. These are the only candidates Faria discusses, making me wonder if he’s connected to the DeSantis campaign in some way. But his point is that Biden is vulnerable and Trump can’t take advantage while someone else could. One reason Trump can’t take advantage is that he’s almost as old as Biden. The other is that he’s just a proven loser.

Again, those are swing states that Trump has already lost. He lost Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to Biden in 2020. He then lost in all of those states again as his picks in the 2022 midterm elections flamed out. Do Republicans really want to take the coin flip chance in those states when it is clear the coin will be weighted against them?

Over the last three election cycles, Trump has done nothing but lose. He has empowered Democrats both through his own failures as a candidate and through his handpicked nominees in high-profile races. He is the only candidate who is as unpopular as Biden. He is the only candidate who is as old as Biden. He is the only candidate who has lost to Biden already.

There is only one mention in the piece that Trump has any substantive defects. Faria writes “He wouldn’t be protected from the Deep State (that he didn’t dismantle) or from indictments. He would be a loser, again.”

Trump “wouldn’t be protected…from indictments.” That’s it. As for the merits of those indictments, Faria writes, “Biden’s Justice Department is targeting Trump, in part, because Biden and his team want GOP voters to rally around him. Everyone knows that Trump is the most likely candidate to get Biden and Harris back into the White House.”

The calculation here seems to be that it’s pointless to criticize Trump for anything other than being a loser. In fact, to get taken seriously at all, it’s necessary to concede that Trump’s legal problems are illegitimate and that he’s a victim of a Deep State plot and Democratic conspiracy.

The problem is obvious. If Trump is innocent, then he deserves support. If he doesn’t belong in prison, and the only way he can avoid prison is to win the presidential election, then Republicans should try to make that happen. Anything less would not only be an injustice but it would reward bad behavior from Trump’s enemies.

Faria really can’t overcome this logic, although he tries by using the reverse psychology argument that the conspiracy is designed to make Republicans rally to Trump’s side, so don’t fall for it!

To spell it out, Faria is saying that Trump is going to be unjustly imprisoned but Republicans should just let that happen because opposing it is a trap.

It’s just not compelling. It doesn’t take the moral high ground at all. It asks Republicans to throw Trump to the wolves out of pure cynical calculation, not because he deserves it but because the plot against him is too strong to be effectively resisted.

Again, I believe the reason Faria takes this approach is because he thinks it’s impossible to make any argument against Trump on the merits. Republicans won’t take the charges against Trump seriously and will tune out anyone who gives those criticisms any purchase. But the poll that matters right now is the one cited by Faria showing “President Donald Trump leads Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) among GOP primary voters 60%-36% in a head-to-head matchup.”

That’s the poll that inspired Faria to write this column in the first place and ask “How badly do Republican voters want to lose?” It may be hard to convince Republicans that Trump is guilty as charged, but characterizing him as an innocent victim is giving up without trying. I don’t see how it can possibly move the numbers in the way that Faria clearly wants. If no one on the right will make the moral argument against Trump, he will be the nominee again, because not supporting him amounts to lending a hand to an unjust persecution.

On July 15, 2021, Susan Glasser of the New Yorker published a piece headlined “You’re Gonna Have a Fucking War”: Mark Milley’s Fight to Stop Trump from Striking Iran. Mark Milley was, and still is, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer. Here is how the article began:

The last time that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke with President Donald Trump was on January 3, 2021. The subject of the Sunday-afternoon meeting, at the White House, was Iran’s nuclear program. For the past several months, Milley had been engaged in an alarmed effort to insure that Trump did not embark on a military conflict with Iran as part of his quixotic campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election and remain in power. The chairman secretly feared that Trump would insist on launching a strike on Iranian interests that could set off a full-blown war.

They key fact here is that, rightly or wrongly, our nation’s highest-ranking military officer was very concerned that Trump would attack Iran as part of a plan to remain in power despite having lost the 2020 presidential election. Now, it’s quite possible that Milley was being paranoid and that Trump never considered carrying out that kind of desperate plan, but we know he did attempt a coup by other means. At least in that respect, Milley’s alarm was prescient.

When Trump read Glassner’s article, it irritated him greatly, and he was keen to punch back. And that sets the context for a meeting he had at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf resort later in July. In attendance were two people working on the memoir of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, as well as two Trump aides. None of them had security clearances to see classified information. Trump wanted to convey to these authors that Glasser had the story backwards. It wasn’t he that had been pushing to attack Iran but rather the Pentagon brass, including Milley, who had been pressuring him.

As proof of his claim, he brought out a document which he described as something “the Defense Department and [Milley]” had “presented” to him. He asked them repeatedly to look at it, and said it demonstrated that “[Milley] wanted to attack Iran” and “This totally wins my case.”

From the audio of the conversation, it’s clear that Trump wants these the writers to use the document to help him “win his case” against Milley’s allegations, but he recognizes that it’s problematic. He notes that the document is “highly confidential, secret. This is secret information” before admitting “as president I could have declassified it, but now I can’t.”

It’s not clear what Trump was showing them, but it was probably not proof that Milley wanted to attack Iran. The Pentagon naturally draws up contingency plans for every conceivable scenario, and it’s certain that they provided Trump with options for taking actions against Iran that ran the gamut from tougher sanctions to full blown invasion. The existence of these plans is not in any way advocacy for any particular course of action. What we know is that the information came from the Pentagon, was highly confidential and secret, and that it had to do with attacking Iran. It was not something that should have been in Trump’s possession, and it definitely was not something that he should have been showing to people who lacked security clearances.

It’s also something Trump has not turned over to the government. Either he still has it or he disposed of it, but his lawyers claim they can’t find it, and Trump claims it never existed.

Trump’s statements on the audio recording, saying “these are the papers” and referring to something he calls “highly confidential” and seems to be showing others in the room, could undercut the former president’s claims in an interview last week with Fox News’ Bret Baier that he did not have any documents with him.

“There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,” Trump said on Fox. “And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”

One wonders why he bothers to tell such easily rebutted lies. They won’t help him in court. In fact, they’ll greatly hurt his credibility with the jurors. In this case, it’s really comprehensive in undercutting his defense. First, he admits that he’s in possession of material that remains classified and that he is powerless to declassify it. Second, the fact that document still hasn’t been returned demonstrates that he has not complied with a legally issued subpoena requiring him to turn it over. The fact that the document was in New Jersey rather than at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida raises questions about how honest he’s been about where he kept classified information. Third, his eagerness to share it with people not authorized to see it completely blows up any idea that his possession of classified information was harmless and comparable to other presidents (and vice-presidents) who improperly retained classified information. Fourth, his decision to go on television and lie about this episode will be admissible evidence, and since he’s highly unlikely to testify in his own defense it will go un-rebutted. Fifth, it shows his modus operandi. He wants to use classified information as a political weapon.

Amazingly, Trump is on the record talking about what wrong that is. In August 2018, when he revoked former Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan’s security clearance, he issued a statement that read in part, “Such access is particularly inappropriate when former officials have transitioned into highly partisan positions and seek to use real or perceived access to sensitive information to validate their political attacks.”

That is precisely what Trump was doing during this interview with Meadow’s biographers. He was using his access to classified information to validate a political attack on Milley.

Maybe Trump will get lucky and a Florida jury will deadlock causing a mistrial. But he’s so obviously guilty that it will hard for any juror to hold out and say that case is unproven.

Sorry that I’ve been away from my keyboard for so long. A lot of crazy things have happened in the interim, like a near coup in Moscow that threatened to take Vladimir Putin out like a second-rate Muammar Gaddafi. The truth is that I took some time off to go see one of the last-ever Dead & Company shows in Queens, and then I’ve been preoccupied with trying to start a podcast with my longtime buddy, Brendan Skwire (here seen creating Speed Metal Bluegrass version of Bill Monroe’s Wheel Hoss).

Nothing makes you appreciate the talent and work required for something like trying to do it yourself. We’ve been laboring to put the pieces together for a podcast for months, and it feels like a Herculean task. We finally have all the required equipment and a grasp on the editing skills we need. We’ve listened to a lot of radio shows and podcasts to get a feel for how these things are put together and what makes for compelling content. We’ve sat down with successful podcasters to pick their brains. And we’ve done a couple of dry-runs now. The last segment we did will probably serve as the bulk of our introductory episode, but we still have more to do.

To start, we’re going to be audio only. And we won’t be taking any callers. We just need to get our feet wet. If we wait around to have everything we want ready, we’ll never get off the blocks.

Brendan and I met through political activism, and we’ve both written about politics for years, but we don’t want our podcast to be limited to that. We’re both looking for a bit of a change of pace. He’s a musician and public school teacher, and I’m a bit burned out on the political grind I’ve been doing exclusively for the 18 years since I launched Booman Tribune. So, we’ll talk about sports, music, culture, history or whatever else we want to talk about in addition to the big political stories of the week.

Having said that, you Progress Pond readers are the primary audience for this, and we want to know what you’re interested in. Eventually, we’ll let you call in to the show, but for now maybe you can just let us know in the comments. Whether it’s a personal question or something about an article one of us has written, or something else, it’s basically just a matter of what you’d like to ask. Also, what kind of content are you interested in?

I can already tell you, that I have gained a lot of respect and appreciation for people who do professional podcasting. It’s a lot of work, and getting good at it will take some time. But it’s also fun, and we all need more fun, right?

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Cape May, New Jersey scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have repainted the background including the utility pole and haze behind. Also revised is the street below. Finally, the lower windows have been revised.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

It’s Friday, so what could you possibly want to discuss more than a tax treaty between the United States and Chile? It’s a topic worth discussing because the U.S. Senate finally ratified the treaty on Thursday in a 96-2 roll call vote. It was the culmination of a 13-year effort that was held up primarily by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. Paul and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri were the only dissenters on final passage. So, why did Paul object and why were his objections finally overcome now?

Ostensibly, Paul’s concern is that the treaty will give the Chilean government insights into some Americans’ taxes which is a violation of privacy. I have my doubts that this is his true objection, but after perusing several articles spanning more than a decade, I haven’t found an alternative explanation. In any case, ratification of the treaty has been a long, painful process.

On February 4, 2010, the United States and Chile signed the Convention between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Republic of Chile for the Avoidance of Double Taxation and the Prevention of Fiscal Evasion with Respect to Taxes on Income and Capital (the US-Chile Treaty or the Treaty). See US Senate approves four treaty protocols for background. It was referred to the SFRC [Senate Foreign Relations Committee] on May 17, 2012 and considered at SFRC hearings and reported out favorably in 2014 and 2015 but was not voted on by the full Senate.

You can read a scholarly abstract on what the provisions of the treaty are designed to do here. It’s basically a way to make foreign direct investment in Chile more attractive and profitable for Americans, while giving the Chilean government some reason to expect that any loss of tax collection through lower rates will be made up by cracking down on tax avoidance and the generation of higher economic growth. The treaty has been a priority for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and you’ll note that it won the unanimous support of Democrats across the ideological spectrum from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin.

The reason it finally won ratification is that lithium is becoming more and more important as the country and the world move toward a clearer energy future featuring a lot less coal and gas and a lot more electric vehicles (EVs), solar cells, and wind turbines. Chile has the largest lithium reserves in the world. The largest lithium mine in the world is in Chile. It’s operated by an American company called Albemarle. But companies like Albemarle have been suffering a competitive disadvantage because Chile has already signed a tax treaty with a couple dozen countries.

Without a ratified treaty to avoid double taxation, taxes on U.S. companies with Chilean operations will climb as high as 44%. However, companies headquartered in the two dozen European, Asian, and Western Hemisphere countries with which Chile already has a tax treaty in force will benefit from a much lower tax rate and would thus secure a significant competitive advantage over their U.S. competitors.

It’s expected that foreign investment in Chile’s lithium industry will create an economic boom, and the U.S. Senate doesn’t want America to lose out, especially to competitors like China. Just as securing access to foreign oil fields has been both a profit and a national security priority, the same is true for the vital minerals of the future.

Why has Sen. Paul been standing in the way? Maybe Kentucky’s coal economy has something to do with it? Maybe it’s some Ayn Rand-related libertarian tic that makes no sense to ordinary people. Whatever the reason, his fight is over and he lost.

I wasn’t going to let Summer Solstice (in the Northern Hemisphere) pass without a midweek post. It’s been an eventful last couple weeks. That includes a severe storm that hit our area overnight right after I got home from a work site. The tree itself was not salvageable, so we had it cut down and stumped. If nothing else, we get a bit more natural light in the northern facing rooms in our home. That works for me.

I’ll drop some Aphex Twin to start:

Apparently my kids will remember me as the one who introduced them to Aphex Twin’s music.

Happy Summer Solstice!

 

I’m glad to learn that Hunter Biden will take responsibility for mistakes he made while he was in the throes of a cocaine addiction. He’s admitting to not paying taxes in 2017 and 2018, and also to lying about his drug use on an application for a gun license. Getting this behind him will actually help in his recovery and, provided he abides by the terms of his probation, he should not do any jail time. His case was investigated by a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney from Delaware, and this should be the end of the controversy, but we know that the right will never stop exploiting Hunter’s addiction. They’ve convinced theirselves that he’s a monster rather than a flawed individual who is trying to atone for some deplorable behavior and get his life back together.

You can see this pattern at work in former Attorney General William Barr’s effort to talk reason to the right about the seriousness of the documents charges against Donald Trump. In order to have any credibility with the right, Barr feels it necessary to concede that there has been a double standard with respect to how Trump has been treated and how Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden have been treated. Of course, he wrote the piece prior to learning that Hunter will face charges.

Rather, the argument advanced by Trump’s defenders is that, even though Trump’s conduct was indefensible and likely a serious crime, Hillary did the same thing. And it’s unfair that Hillary got away with it.

But if Trump engaged in the kind of brazen criminal conduct alleged, then applying the law in his case is not unfair to him. The injustice lies in not having applied it seven years ago to Hillary. You don’t rectify that omission by giving future violators a free pass. You rectify it by applying the right standard to the case at hand, and insisting it is applied to comparable cases going forward. Here, that means ensuring the same standard is applied in the pending investigations of Hunter Biden and President Biden’s handling of classified documents.

You can see the rhetorical strategy here. Barr is saying that Trump’s crimes are obvious and serious, and you can’t wipe that away by saying “what about Hillary and Hunter?”

For my part, I’ve always taken Hillary’s cavalier handling of information security more seriously than most on the left. I didn’t disagree with the government’s determination that she was reckless and I thought Trump was within his rights to make it a major campaign issue. That didn’t mean I thought she should be “locked up,” but it was a real knock against her otherwise sterling credentials to serve as president of the United States. Of course, now that we’ve seen how Trump handled sensitive documents both in and out of office, it’s obvious she was the better choice on the issue.

As for Hunter, I’ve always seen his treatment as just opportunistic and cruel. I feel kind of protective of Joe Biden considering the monumental family tragedies he’s endured, and it pains me to see Hunter’s substance abuse problems used politically to go after his father. I know this plea agreement won’t put an end to this, but it will drain some of the energy out of it. I think it will ultimately be beneficial for Hunter, too, on his road of recovery.

The “what about Hunter?” argument will have less plausibility as a defense of Trump now that the DOJ has shown itself unafraid to charge the president’s son. And the right should heed Barr’s warning: “Many loyal Republicans have instinctively rushed to the ramparts to defend Trump. I understand that impulse. But with each new revelation, they look more and more foolish.”

The key is that Trump could easily have received less than a “slap on the hand” if he had relented and turned over the classified information. He chose to commit serious felonies instead.

Back in March, Heidi Przybyla of Politico wrote an in depth article about Trump administration veterans getting organized to run Washington DC in a whole new way. When Trump came into office, he had no political machinery in the city and it really amounted to a hostile takeover. The problem was the new team lacked institutional knowledge. It also lacked power in Congress, where the few true Trumpists were newly elected backbenchers. When this combined with Trump’s disinterest in the nuts and bolts of the legislative process, the result was a failure to translate Trump’s vision into law.

Enter the Conservative Partnership Institute, an organization closely associated with former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. Among their goals is to get their claws into the congressional staff. The CPI claims to be the “go-to organization” for vetting candidates for congressional office openings.

A group closely aligned with former President Donald Trump helped organize a “bootcamp” for GOP congressional staff this past February, training them on how to conduct aggressive oversight of the Biden administration, according to new disclosure forms filed with the U.S. House clerk’s office.

The sponsor, the Conservative Partnership Institute, counts Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows among its leaders and has been described as the “nerve center” for the MAGA movement and MAGA-aligned lawmakers. It was one of three organizations to host the gathering.

Today, the New York Times goes further, with an article from Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel that explores how “Republican lawmakers and activists are mounting a sweeping legal campaign against universities, think tanks and private companies that study the spread of disinformation, accusing them of colluding with the government to suppress conservative speech online.”

Another key organization in this process is the America First Legal Foundation, which is run by former top Trump adviser Stephen Miller. It’s stated goal is “challenging Biden administration policies in court” but, working in concert with House Republicans, they’re currently going after universities, non-profit organizations, and even graduate students in an effort to harass and shut down independent fact-checking, particularly related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the integrity of the 2020 presidential election results.

The House Judiciary Committee, which in January came under Republican majority control, has sent scores of letters and subpoenas to the researchers — only some of which have been made public. It has threatened legal action against those who have not responded quickly or fully enough.

A conservative advocacy group led by Stephen Miller, the former adviser to Mr. Trump, filed a class-action lawsuit last month in U.S. District Court in Louisiana that echoes many of the committee’s accusations and focuses on some of the same defendants.

Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online.

That this is all part of one larger effort can be seen, for example, by the fact that Ed Corrigan, the CEO and president of the CPI is also a board member of the America First Legal Foundation. As for the “bootcamp” for GOP congressional staff this past February, attendees assembled at the Heritage Foundation’s headquarters and were bussed to a 2,200-acre compound recently purchased by CPI.  The compound is known as Camp Rydin. It’s named for Mike Rydin, the former CEO of a construction software company in Texas called HCSS. There’s a also a CPI-owned $1.5 million townhouse in Washington DC known as “Rydin House.”

Whatever ultimately happens with Trump, these groups and benefactors are working hard to institutionalize his madness within the actual machinery of the Republican Party and its legislative process. Insofar as institutionalists like former Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell have been able to ward off the most nihilistic impulses of Trump’s populist fascist movement, we should not expect that to continue. The factual world is under attack, and that’s why we’re seeing a coordinated effort to defang independent fact-checkers.

If they gain control again, they will be in position to finish the job of destroying freedom of thought in this country. They will break and destroy anything that stands in their way.