In today’s political news - Part 6

Gee look at that, the voters picked a trump candidate over the incumbent who voted to impeach dumpster don, the organized crime wave.

And his week keeps getting better…

And he is all but bragging about it.

That quote he made had better be part of any story about him invoking the 5th.

Whatever happened to honesty?




And then he’s back..

The question is when are the people going to wake up and see what’s happening?  Or maybe they do see and don’t care believing whatever will happen won’t affect them personally.

From The Washington Post….

“Opinion Republicans dream of vengeance — and dismantling the federal government”

By Paul Waldman
Columnist
August 10, 2022 at 11:25 a.m. EDT

“That Republicans would be outraged when the FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club was no surprise. That they would refuse to even consider the possibility that their dear leader had done anything wrong was likewise predictable. But their effort to defend Trump has taken on a particularly disturbing shape.

For the honor of Trump’s sacred Palm Beach redoubt, defiled by the presence of federal agents wielding a search warrant, they demand vengeance. And their focus has quickly turned to what they will do when they next take power: whom they will punish, whom they will purge, which institutions they will tear down and how much destruction they will bring to Washington.

There’s no way to know how it will play out whenever they do regain complete control of the government, but the nearly euphoric rage coming from the right suggests they have found an excuse for something they have long desired. And the more they talk about it, the more likely they will act on it when they have the chance.

Different people on the right responded to the FBI search in somewhat different ways, but all of them pushed in the same direction. While almost no one in the GOP was willing to say, “Since we don’t know what they were looking for or what they found, perhaps we should withhold judgment,” the somewhat polite Republicans promised to haul Justice Department officials before Congress to explain exactly what led to the search and how the decision was made. Which ought to be fine with Trump critics; yes, let’s hear more about the evidence of his wrongdoing.

At the other end of the spectrum, the broiling corners of the internet where pro-Trump insurrectionists gather vibrated with calls for violence and civil war. And in what passes for the conservative mainstream, a duly authorized and executed search warrant became a justification for a mass purge.

Former Trump White House official Russell Vought, who runs a pro-Trump think tank planning for the Trump restoration, said Republicans ought to “dismantle the FBI into a thousand bits.” Right-wing YouTuber Steven Crowder, who has 5.7 million subscribers, said the next Republican president “needs to prosecute everyone” and insisted on “the dismantling, dismembering, complete restructuring if at all of all of our intelligence agencies.”

“When we get power back, it’s time to hold everyone accountable,” said Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “The military leadership, the civilian leadership, the civil service, those in Congress who have abused their power, all of them have to be held accountable.”

Republican politicians and pundits repeatedly used phrases such as “banana republic,” asserting not merely that the decision to search Trump’s club and retrieve documents was wrong, but that the entire U.S. government had taken an illegitimate form.

This comes just a few weeks after reports that Trump loyalists have been preparing what I called Turnkey Authoritarianism, a plan to change existing rules that protect the federal civil service from political meddling, purge as many as 50,000 nonpartisan federal employees and replace them with Trump loyalists.

This is an impulse that has been growing on the right as Republicans consider how to turn Trump’s haphazard antidemocratic impulses into a genuine strategy to reimagine how government works and for whom. They’re thrilled with the way state-level Republicans, especially Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have aggressively used their power to target enemies, whether it’s corporations that tweet support for liberal causes, teachers who talk about racism or libraries that stock books they don’t like.

And they realize now that Trump was too unfocused and too limited in his aims. He obsessed over whether the individuals around him were sufficiently loyal and would do anything he asked, but his view wasn’t expansive enough.

So, as conservatives now spin out fantasies of power and revenge, the same theme keeps emerging: We’ve been too timid, too nice and too respectful of the system. Next time, they insist, we’re not going to mess around. We’re coming for the entire government, not just the inner circle.

Is some of this just playacting for the crowd? Perhaps. But even if it’s turned up to 11 to reach the cheap seats, it creates expectations among the rank-and-file Republicans in the audience who are being told how they should understand what just happened and what ought to be done in response.

Republicans will have to deal with those expectations when they do take power, which will happen sooner or later, perhaps as soon as January 2025. If the base has been told that the Republican agenda is not merely to cut taxes and outlaw abortion but to dismantle the government piece by piece and replace it with a system in which nonpartisanship is treasonous and only conservatives are allowed to serve, then that’s what they’ll demand.

And it’s increasingly clear that within the GOP’s leadership, more and more people dream of nothing less. We don’t know if they can pull it off, but they sure will try.”