HEADS UP TO KEVIN MCCARTHY...

HOW HE ENDS UP TREATING 
EVERYONE WHO COVERS HIM 

 

DESANTIS…DESANTIS…IS THAT CHEROKEE?

 And now, he wants to end birth right citizenship!

In other words, if you're born in the US to brown parents, you might not be a citizen after all. If he has his way, it'll all depend on whether Uncle Ronnie says you are or not.

Has this clown ever even READ the Constitution???

Hey Ron, I know you're a moron, but this is really simple: Let me spell it out for you. I_F  Y_O_U  A_R_E   B_O_R_N   O_N   U_S   S_O_I_L,   Y_O_U   A_R_E   A_M_E_R_I_C_A_N!

Otherwise. all of us whose ancestors washed up on these shores from wherever they washed up from are going to have to pack up and go back to wherever we came from and give the continent back to its original owners, none of whom was called Desantis—the Latin root of which, rather appropriately in this case, means "blameworthy".

 

RUSSIAN EXPOSURE – SOME TAKE-AWAYS

 

For about a New York minute, I found it quite satisfying to see the rats at the top of the autocratic, oligarchic food chain in Russia turning on one another. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s short-lived revolt against a sector of Vladimir Putin’s government (not even the chief of one of the most ruthless mercenary forces ever assembled could muster the guts to oppose Putin himself) was a little like the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s dog Toto knocks over the screen and the wizard is exposed for what he is, an ordinary man with no real power at all except for his ability to make people believe that he is all-powerful.

But once that small pleasure had waned, there were other more practical aspects to consider, as a result of the weekend of utter chaos that Prigozhin visited on Putin’s Russia. The most immediate take-away is that both Putin and Prigozhin came out of this incident much weaker than before.

Putin and Prigozhin - end of the affair

Prigozhin basically ended up having to give up his brutal, tinpot, mercenary army in order to save his own skin when he miscalculated the level of discontent in the Russian Armed Forces in general and among Putin’s closest military commanders in particular. It’s not hard to guess that in his delusions of grandeur, he imagined marching on Moscow and picking up large detachments of the Russian military on the way. That didn’t happen. And despite the fact that he made it clear he was rebelling against the defense ministry and not against the chief of state, Putin, nevertheless, declared him a traitor and vowed that he and his men would be punished to the full measure of the law (which is often whatever Putin says it is). But that didn’t happen either.

Putin, for his part, was caught on his back foot and got waylaid. He seems to have been unaware until the last minute that the rebellion was coming. And yet, as someone who was once an officer in the KBG and who has, over the past twenty years, garnered an enormous measure of autocratic power over the Russian Federation, he should have known. At least some of his generals knew ahead of time but evidently didn’t share that knowledge with the boss.

It seemed clear, at least, to many Russia insiders in the West that Prigozhin was hardly likely to stand still for Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s move to bring the oligarch and his private army, known as the Wagner Group, under the control of the Russian state. Shoigu had earlier issued an order for all Russian mercenaries to join the regular Army by the first of July, which would basically have rendered moot Prigozhin’s until-then enormous power.

It was Putin himself who provided Prigozhin with the power he had come to wield. And ex-convict and self-made man, Prigozhin had become Putin’s go-to guy whenever the president didn’t want to get his own hands dirty. Prigozhin and the Wagner Group repeatedly provided Putin with deniability in unofficial Russian military actions in which crimes against humanity were consistently committed. Prigozhin was also reportedly behind Russian interference in both the 2016 and 2018 elections in the US. 

This is, of course, part of the dictator playbook. When I was covering the bloody reign of a military dictatorship in Argentina in the nineteen seventies and early eighties, paramilitary hit squads, made up largely of retired police and military personnel, carried out most of the torture, political abductions and assassinations in which tens of thousands of people disappeared or were killed. The first junta head and president, Jorge Rafael Videla, would consistently insist, in answer to worldwide outrage, that when orders were given, he had no real control over how they were carried out. A claim that was, of course, ludicrous, as have been all of Putin’s own denials since he started using paramilitary mercenaries to invade Ukrainian territory, clear back to the time when he first annexed Crimea in early 2014.

Ever since it became clear that practically any pyrrhic victory Putin could claim in Ukraine—where his original claims that it would be a walk-over and that his troops would be accepting the Ukrainians’ surrender in short order turned out to be a miscalculated fantasy of epic proportions—has been largely thanks to Prigozhin and his army of mercenary thugs, I started asking myself what the Russian president was going to do when that pack of mad dogs turned on him. This past weekend provided an at least partial answer. I say partial, because the consequences of the rebellion have still not all been revealed. 

Defense Minister Shoigu

While Putin has tried to keep up appearances, in his home-grown Ukraine War, in the face of withering pushback from Ukraine’s Armed Forces and its stoic people in which the Russians have suffered their worst losses since World War II—some forty thousand men killed and another one hundred forty to one hundred sixty thousand injured—Prigozhin’s drive toward Moscow demonstrated clearly that Putin has nothing to spare in the way of military power. A mobilized detachment of the men of the Wagner Group made it from Ukraine to within one hundred twenty-five miles of the Russian capital and, according to Western reports, only encountered armed resistance from the Russian Armed Forces at one point along the way, where the Wagner Group quickly overpowered it.  More telling still, when a deal was struck, the mercenaries were allowed to turn around and go back to where they had come from, and Prigozhin was permitted to slip away into exile.

What this also tended to show was that while Putin’s military, by and large, didn’t turn against him, neither did it make any great effort to defend him, which could be taken as a wait-and-see attitude and/or previews of possible coming attractions. Or perhaps it was just the Russian field military commanders demonstrating that without them, Putin was powerless against overthrow. In the only images that have come out of Prigozhin talking to military officers during his drive toward Moscow, both he and the Russian officers seemed relaxed and non-confrontational. Furthermore, despite all of Putin’s talk of holding the Wagner Group and Prigozhin to account, in the end, he was forced to let Prigozhin escape to exile and to strike a deal, telling the mercenaries that all would be forgiven if they submitted to Russian military control.

He also was forced initially to say that nothing would happen to Prigozhin. But then, nobody believes that, and least of all, Prigozhin. While he agreed to Belarusian exile, he immediately and wisely disappeared from view. From an undisclosed location he would later issue a statement explaining that his idea was never to overthrow Putin. All he was doing, he said, was protecting his men. Clearly, what he was trying to protect was his own power, and without his private army, that power has been considerably reduced. But it has not been wiped out, since, up to now, Prigozhin has been a chief ally of Putin’s in the vast Russian mafia. He is a kingpin, a guy who knows where the bodies are buried. And, without a doubt, he and his Army have been crucial in Putin’s prosecution of his war of aggression against Ukraine and in military action elsewhere.

Seeking to explain the significance of the Russian Defense Ministry’s order for all of Prigozhin’s battle-hardened frontline fighters to place themselves under Russia’s general military command, former US Army in Europe commander, Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, told a TV interviewer that it was rather as if members of Delta Force, Navy SEALs or some other special forces unit were being told to place themselves under the orders of a regular infantry command. But he hastened to point out, however, that this was where the comparison ended, since the Wagner Group wasn’t a highly trained, special forces unit, but rather, a mercenary army made up of criminal thugs and convicts, led by a mafioso.

Prigozhin dressed in battlefield gear

Indeed, for all of his posturing in elaborate military garb and armed to the teeth, Vevgeny Prigozhin is as much a self-style military commander as he is a self-made oligarch. Sometimes known as “Putin’s Chef”, because, under Putin, his food industry interests have catered to the Kremlin, the sixty-two-year-old Prigozhin originated from fairly humble beginnings at the height of Soviet rule in Russia. His Jewish father died while he was still a boy and his mother struggled to support Vevgeny and his ailing grandmother with her work at a hospital in what was then Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). 

Vevgeny’s mother eventually remarried. His stepfather, who was also Jewish, was a cross-country skiing instructor. Vevgeny, who was a teen by this time, took to the sport and hoped to go pro. His stepfather managed to get him into a prestigious athletics school to help him reach his goal, but Vevgeny’s plans didn’t work out in the end.

Almost immediately, Prigozhin turned to a life of crime. He was arrested for stealing at age eighteen. The court went easy on him and gave him a two-year suspended sentence. At twenty, he was arrested again for leading a criminal gang of mostly juvenile delinquents, which burglarized high-end apartment buildings. This time, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison for theft, fraud and corruption of the minors whom he had involved in his crimes. He ended up serving nine years of the sentence before being released in 1990.

On his release he joined his mother and stepfather in a small business selling hotdogs out of stand in an open-air market in Leningrad. In an interview years later, Prigozhin would say that their hotdog business was so thriving that his mother didn’t know what to do with all the money that came rolling in. But Vevgeny did. He embraced the entrepreneurial spirit of the times following the fall of the Soviet Union and invested in a wide variety of interests. From grocery stores and restaurants to marketing research, construction and foreign trade, Prigozhin’s empire expanded exponentially.

But it was apparently his foreign trade interests that eventually led to areas of interest to the Putin regime—notably gold and diamond mining in Central Africa. These interests seem to have provided him with the perfect segue into arms and mercenary recruitment. For some time, Prigozhin denied having anything to do with the Wagner Group—a shadowy paramilitary arm of the Putin regime that was involved in guerrilla warfare activities in several parts of Africa and which eventually showed up in Syria, where Putin was propping up the cruel dictatorship of Bashar Al-Assad in his devastatingly bloody war to put down a nationwide democratic uprising. But he eventually admitted to being the group’s founder, and in Ukraine has become its high-profile commander. His untrained, unschooled and non-strategic approach to war to date has been simple: to throw huge numbers of men and ordnance at the enemy in hopes of eventually overcoming their resistance.

For this unsophisticated and brutal strategy to work, Prigozhin requires either highly motivated or, more often, otherwise hopeless men. That’s why much of his army in Ukraine has been made up of convicted felons, desperados who joined him in order to get out of prison. These are men who have had no problem following their commander’s orders to lay non-military targets to waste and to murder civilians. And in some of the heaviest fighting, Prigozhin himself admitted that he was losing an average of a hundred men a day.

The US has leveled numerous sanctions and criminal charges at Prigozhin in recent years. He is also one of the Russian oligarchs under sanctions in the United Kingdom and in the EU. Additionally, the FBI has offered a bounty of up to two-hundred-fifty thousand dollars for information leading to Prigozhin’s arrest. 

A relaxed Prigozhin meets with Russian military leaders

The uncertainty in Russia hasn’t been allayed, by any means, as a result of the deal reached between the Putin regime and the Wagner Group. Just the fact that Putin put together a flamboyant display honoring the Russian Armed Forces within a couple of days of the mercenaries’ revolt is as telling as it is unusual. Until Prigozhin went rogue, no one was questioning the power of Vladimir Putin. Dictatorships, however, function very much like the Mafia. The capo is the capo…until he isn’t. His power isn’t based on love and loyalty, but on ruthlessness and fear. Power in autocracies in strictly vertical, and a dictator’s continuation in power is subject to the fear of those beneath him. They must feel that the price of betrayal is so certain and so lethal that their only choice is blind loyalty.  Given Putin’s track record, while it’s unlikely anyone is beating down Prigozhin’s door to sell him a life insurance policy, the fact that he and his band of thugs got away, at least for now, with nipping at Putin’s heels will almost certainly be taken as a sign of fear and weakness on Putin’s part. All the more so because, instead of downplaying the incident’s importance, Putin has cast Prigozhin as a dangerous traitor and has thanked and honored the Armed Forces for “saving the country from civil war,” when, in fact, all indications are that the military did precious little in that regard.

Calling the uprising an attempt at civil war tends to show that a much more serious rebellion is a possibility that might be keeping Putin up nights. An admirer of Czar Nicholas and his empire, Putin can hardly help but recall that, in the end, the czar’s failures in foreign wars and the poverty they engendered at home played into the hands of the Bolsheviks so that a revolt by ragtag civilian militias ended up being backed by large numbers of discontented professional soldiers. And Czar Nicholas and his family ended up facing a firing squad.

 

ABOVE THE LAW?

 Former president Donald Trump’s reckless comments to one of his typically self-aggrandizing rallies—it’s never about the Nation he was supposed to have served but, rather, tried to place at his own service, it’s always about him because, clearly, he thinks he’s the most important being in the universe—make it crystal clear that he believes himself to be above the law.

Trump..."a hit job"

It was in Columbus, Georgia, before a rally throng of two thousand supporters that Trump made his first comments on the thirty-seven felony count indictment unsealed at the end of the week. As usual, he sought to make out something strictly about his misdeeds, criminal behavior, presidential misconduct and contempt for the law to be a national cause. The first thing he did was tell his most fervent and blindly loyal supporters that this wasn’t about him. It was about them.

In a rabble-rousing diatribe, Trump told members of his base, “In the end, they're not coming after me. They're coming after you, and I'm just standing in their way.” He also called the case against him “a political hit job,” and sought, in his typical ad hominem fashion to belittle his accuser, calling Special Counsel Smith “a deranged lunatic”, “a psycho” and “a Trump-hater.” He also made light of commonness of Jack Smith’s name, quipping, “What was his name before he changed it?”

This has been Trump’s message from the outset, when he first announced his candidacy for the presidency in June of 2015. Since then he has conned his followers with the message that anyone calling him out on his misdeeds is merely a hater who is accusing him falsely, that it’s all a rigged system, and suggesting that he is “the only one who can fix it.”

It is easy to fool people who want desperately to believe that their own view that everything is going to hell in a handcart is not just a perception, but a hard and fast fact. It is not a hard sell when the victims of a con are willing ones, who want to believe the con. In fact, that is precisely what con artists have always done—encouraged their victims to believe what they would like to believe in, as a means of getting the upper hand and taking advantage of their naivety.

Trump, experienced grifter that he has been throughout his long and infamous business career, is surely not above lying to make his grift stick. Indeed, even in a profession like politics where lying, deceit and subterfuge are practically synonymous with the term “politician”, it would be hard to find a single political figure—and particularly president—in the history of the United States who has lied as consistently about practically everything as Donald J. Trump has.

This is not an unfair or unwarranted charge, considering that fact-checkers in every serious medium one can think of mutually and consistently caught Trump in blatant lies or misleading statements to the public at least thirty thousand times over the course of his four-year presidency. But again, conning a person or group of persons isn’t hard if they are more than willing believers in the grift.

Trump is often touted in even the liberal media as “a master of deception” or as a “spin genius”. But the truth is that he’s not really a good liar at all, nor would his grifts work on even the most mildly skeptical of marks. His lies are laced with holes and wouldn’t hold water with a keen-minded ten-year-old. What makes his lies stick is the willingness of his base to accept him as The Owner of the Truth.

So what’s his secret? The secret of his success in pulling the wool over the eyes of a frighteningly large segment of the American population is that he is always preaching to the choir. In doing so, if he has had any stroke of genius at all, it lies in his having convinced a certain rather large demographic in US society that he is “the only one telling them the truth.” He has successfully and incredibly convinced his followers that everybody is lying to them but him—the media, the government, the courts, even the US intelligence community and the FBI. He has entranced them to the point that he has become the arbiter of their “truth”. He is the judge of what is truth and what’s false. He is the “outsider”, the avenging angel, the only leader who can make right everything that is wrong in their lives.

But what happened during the four years when he was president and nothing substantially changed in the lives of those followers and when basically everything he had promised them during his campaign was laid naked as a bald-faced lie? Grift Two is what happened. He blamed the opposition, traitors in his own party and administration, lying liberal journalists and, above all, “the deep state”.

Suddenly, his followers were his defenders, his liberating army, his enforcers, ready and willing to overthrow democracy—while convinced they were defending it from the “rigged system”—by violent means. That’s how the insurrection of January Sixth 2021 happened. The date deserves capitalizing because it is a major event in our history that will surely be studied in the future. How it is studied—whether as the blackest day in US democracy, or as the day a glorious populist revolution began—will depend on whether or not US democracy and our founding liberal traditions survive the Trump Era. Especially when the hierarchy of the Republican Party, few of whom have swallowed the Trump con, but instead have become his shills in detriment to the Nation but in favor of their own political expediencies, have become his accomplices in duping “the base”.

In this struggle between—dare I say it? —good and evil (or at least between the rule of law and abject lawlessness), the federal indictment of Donald Trump this past week is a turning point, a line drawn in the sand, basically, an all-out last-ditch effort to keep authoritarianism from taking root in the United States of America. This will be the test of whether a felon, if convicted in a court of law, of the serious crimes with which he is charged, is subject to the law, even if he is a former president and a highly popular public figure.

It is worth pointing out that the case doesn’t involve a lone felony count that could be open to misinterpretation. Rather, the special counsel in charge, Jack Smith, has carefully constructed a well-documented and meticulously vetted list of no fewer than thirty-seven federal crimes directly linked to the former president. If he can prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt in a federal court, Trump could be facing the possibility of prison for the rest of his life. And considering the seriousness of some of these crimes—especially gross violations of the Espionage Act that might well have compromised not only US national security, but also the security of our foreign allies—if Trump is proven guilty, the punishment must fit the crime, if justice is to be served.

Jack Smith - "the law applies to everyone."

Smith is pushing for a speedy initiation of legal action so as to avoid any appearance of an attempt to disrupt the 2024 election process in which, thanks to the GOP’s self-serving acquiescence, Trump promises to be a frontrunner. But Smith also vows to be thorough in proving his charges beyond the shadow of a doubt, saying, “We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everyone.”

In a perfect world, there would be no way that Trump’s defense could complain that they are arguing their case before a hostile court. The venue is in ruby-red Florida and the judge, Aileen Cannon, is a 2020 Trump appointee to the federal bench, who has been criticized in the past for going out of her way to favor Trump in earlier court action involving the Mar-a-Lago documents case. Furthermore, jurors in Florida apparently have a well-established history of siding with elected officials against the prosecution.

In other words, in a veritable litmus test for democracy, equality and the rule of law, if Smith proves unquestionably the felony charges his investigation is bringing against Trump and achieves a guilty verdict, Trump’s punishment must fit the crime. Any other outcome would mean that in the United States, fame and authoritarian populist power are above the law. And US democracy will have been permanently degraded and undermined.           

 

LIKE AN ITCH THAT NEEDS SCRATCHING

I owe my deepest thanks to several hundred people who, despite my lackadaisical approach to this political and social blog have continued to check in on it from time to time every month, apparently to see if, perhaps, I’ve quit messing around and gotten back to work. It’s humbling to see that, even though I consistently disappoint, a handful of people—actually a couple of handfuls—per day are dropping by, even when weeks or months pass without my uttering a syllable. I figure they are either going back and checking out old entries they might have missed, or, perhaps, they are simply keeping the faith by sticking their proverbial head in the door, seeing the lights are still out, and quietly leaving.

Again, my humblest of apologies.

That said, whether they love or hate what I write (few are indifferent) about the contemporary political and social scene, trying to provide an independent viewpoint beyond partisan lines, they are consistent in their apparent desire for me to keep covering these subjects because if not, the hits this “other blog” of mine gets would dwindle to zero, and that simply doesn’t happen. Ever.

Why? Because they are right to keep coming back in that I never seem to be able to kick the news habit I acquired in twenty years of professional journalism, when I was a much younger man. And like so many other addicts, no matter how old I get, I eventually fall off the wagon and start editorializing again. I seem unable to help it. It’s like an itch I can never completely scratch, and never quite reach.

So, in the end, there’s nothing for it—no matter how much I might want to bury my press card forever and devote myself entirely to my “normal” literary efforts and to my Southern Yankee blog southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com—but to admit that I’ll always be stimulated by current events. And worse still—and to the chagrin of many—I’ll never be able to just shut-up and keep my opinions and observations to myself.

It’s an itch way more powerful than I am. So stay tuned. As the Terminator might say, I’ll be back.

(AD)DRESS CODE

I cannot believe how many jerks in Congress and on TV were worried about how Zelensky was dressed when he appeared before Congress.

Really???

That morning the guy was on the front lines handing out medals to true heroes while all of these sleazes were taking up wasted oxygen instead of worrying about how to support Ukraine and help its brave people stop Putin in his tracks.

Zelensky is one of the truest examples of a modern-day hero, a David who has taken on Goliath. My only irate question is, who gives a flying fuck what he wore to Congress? As if scores of senators and representatives haven't already violated and spat on any pretended decorum, integrity and sanctity that that body ever might have presumed.

IF IT WALKS LIKE A DUCK AND TALKS LIKE A DUCK…

 

“A massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

—Former President Donald J. Trump—

He never should have gotten this far. Donald Trump never should have been a candidate for president and certainly never should have been endorsed by the Republican Party. Many of us said this from the outset—screamed it from the rafters, in fact. Okay, so a lot of people refused to listen, refused to see the warning signs, refused to face reality. We had to learn the hard way.

But even after Trump clearly demonstrated that he was not only as bad as, but actually even worse than some of us had warned, even after he abused power for four years, usurped the leadership of the GOP and bastardized its traditional party line to fit his ambitions, even after he engaged in nepotism, pardoned his cronies of their crimes and heaped praise on every ruthless dictator he met, after he tried his level best to demonstrate unequivocally that he was an enemy of our allies, an enemy of American traditions and ideals, an enemy of the Constitution and an enemy of liberal democracy, even then, the majority of the GOP leadership backed him to the hilt. And leading Republicans who were appalled and refused to bend to Trump’s inexplicable power in the party were ousted from positions of leadership and opposed for reelection in their own camp. In most cases they also received threats against their lives and those of their families, in tactics usually circumscribed to the world of gangsters and organized crime, when not to the world’s worst dictatorships—Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia, and Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, among others, where opposing the authoritarian leader exposes rivals to mortal risk.

Then, this would-be authoritarian president of the United States did the unthinkable and, for the first time in the history of the country, refused to accept the results of a free and fair democratic election—the most transparent election in American history—that he lost, went to more than sixty courts to try and find a judge who would quash the election results, and when that flatly failed, sought to elicit help from the Supreme Court, which he had heavily weighted in his favor by appointing three far-right justices during his time in office, but was rebuked once again. And when all else failed, he tried to pressure election officials to alter the results of the elections in their states by “finding” the necessary votes to overturn his loss—votes that clearly weren’t there. Then, when any sane person would have just accepted clear defeat—in his case, marked by a seven million popular vote margin and a definitive majority for the other candidate in the Electoral College—he again made dubious history by inciting an insurrection in which his most radicalized supporters violently attacked and sought to take over Congress, in an assault that left one police officer dead, one hundred forty-four injured, the Capitol in shambles and lawmakers and Trump’s own vice president, whom he abandoned to the attackers, having to run for their lives.

And yet, the Trump-infected GOP—it’s hard to think of the party any other way, since Donald Trump is like a virulent virus that has attacked and continues to attack liberal democracy and all other core American values—refuses to flatly reject Donald Trump or to question his party leadership. Like infected cells in an infirm body, his vast majority of enablers in the party have been killing off the remaining healthy cells—true conservative democratic Republicans like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Anthony Gonzalez, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Peter Meijer, Tom Rice and John Katko, all of whom were either primaried by Trump-groomed candidates or decided not to run again.

Only two of the ten who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6^th, 2020 insurrection have survived the authoritarian onslaught (namely, California Republican David Valadao and Washington State Republican Dan Newhouse). Instead of being praised for standing up for democracy and against Trump’s authoritarian designs, the GOP leadership (in the person of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and his merry band of election deniers and insurrection justifiers) ousted the likes of Cheney and Kinzinger for daring to sit on the House January Sixth Committee, an investigative body that has been doing what all sides in Congress should be devoted to doing: investigating the role of the former president in a plot to overthrow the US government and install a dictatorship in 2020.

Even after the drama of the January Sixth Revolt and its attendant aftermath, the GOP leadership has remained too cowed by Trump and his minority base to call the former president out, and has once again permitted him to register as the main Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential race—this, despite the fact that all serious political opinion polls are showing the only other apparent GOP candidate so far, Ron DeSantis, to be far ahead of Trump in popularity.

Continuing to embrace Trump, as if in some sort of trance from which they can’t seem to wake up, the GOP leadership suffered a veritable trouncing in the recent midterm elections. Widely predicted to win a resounding victory in both chambers of Congress in those elections, the party’s decision to support Trump-backed election deniers and conspiracy theorists in major House and Senatorial races cost them dearly as those candidates, by and large, suffered humiliating defeats. In the end, the GOP shared that humiliation, far underperforming pre-election expectations and once again losing the Senate to the Democrats and only eking out a razor-thin majority in the House.

It wasn’t, however, like it should have come as a surprise to the GOP leadership—or to the less than oracular pundits who predicted a GOP shutout—since the party had already made the same mistake twice before in elections in which they took a beating because they misread just how sick and tired the majority of Americans are of Trump and his narcissistic quest to be a king rather than a president. What is more, opinion polls since the midterms seem to be clearly demonstrating that disillusionment with Trump is only growing, with his popularity plummeting following the vote.

The message is that it is clear to swing-voters, independents and traditional conservatives that Trump’s politics are toxic and un-American. They are no longer willing to put up with a supposedly conservative party that looks more like a three-ring circus with a modern-day P.T. Barnum grifter as the ringmaster. They want to see a new face in 2024 and for Trump to be a four-year “wonder” who finally fades away.

The more unpopular he is becoming, nevertheless, the more Trump is typically doubling down on his anti-democratic rhetoric, still vehemently resisting conceding his 2020 election defeat, still spouting conspiracy theories and claiming “massive election fraud” in the 2020 General Elections. The Supreme Court that he thought he “owned” after naming three hand-picked justices to it during his White House tenure has stubbornly rejected his every attempt to use the Court as a tool to help him legitimize his false claims of a fraudulent election. And the three justices that he appointed have, to their credit, shown that they, unlike him, will continue to defend the US Constitution and the rule of law, that they are, in other words, the exact opposite of what he has just accused them of being: namely, an institution that, in his words “has lost its honor, prestige, and standing, and has become nothing more than a political body…” On the contrary, the Court remains a bastion of justice that opposes the designs of a would-be despot—even if it’s the same tyrant who named a third of the Court.

Trump’s meltdowns are growing more and more worthy of concern. They would be of no concern at all, it should be pointed out, if it weren’t for the fact that prominent Republican leaders continue to render him relevant on the American political scene, instead of treating him like the raving madman that he has become. In this latest phase of the Madness of King Donald, he is now calling for the Constitution to be “terminated”. This is rhetoric that is, by any standard in American life, qualifiable as “batshit crazy.” And yet, way too many powerful Republicans are either going through a thousand sweaty contortions to act like they’re not sure what he meant, or are ignoring the pronouncement completely, with only a handful unequivocally criticizing him for saying it.

This begs the question, if the GOP has lost three elections because of Trump, if they got trounced because of him and his conspiracy-theorist candidates in the latest midterms, and if, with their own ears, they’re hearing him call for the dissolution of the rule of law in the United States, is it still all about the party’s being cold-sweat scared of “losing the Trump base”? Because if that’s the case, don’t look now, guys, but that base is shrinking by the minute, proportionate to the growth of Trump’s own legal liability—because, slowly but surely, Justice is coming for him.

Instead of thinking of the Trump “base” as some magical key to success, the GOP should be thinking of it as an ice cube, and if they continue to try and hold onto it against all odds, they had better start thinking of 2024 as what is very likely to be the sweltering summer of the party’s electoral discontent.