Sobering Saturday morning read from Ron Suskind, the man who warned us about Bush's GOP mocking us for being part of “the reality based community” back in 2004. Now he's got a new warning: Trump's loyalty based community:

Many of the officials I spoke to came back to one idea: You don't know Donald Trump like we do. Even though they can't predict exactly what will happen, their concerns range from the president welcoming, then leveraging, foreign interference in the election, to encouraging havoc that grows into conflagrations that would merit his calling upon U.S. forces. Because he is now surrounded by loyalists, they say, there is no one to try to tell an impulsive man what he should or shouldn't do.

“That guy you saw in the debate,” a second former senior intelligence official told me, after the first debate, when the president offered one of the most astonishing performances of any leader in modern American history — bullying, ridiculing, manic, boasting, fabricating, relentlessly interrupting and talking over his opponent. “That's really him. Not the myth that's been created. That's Trump.”

Still another senior government official, who spent years working in proximity to Mr. Trump, put it like this: “He has done nothing else that's a constant, except for acting in his own interest.” And that's how “he's going to be thinking, every step of the way, come Nov. 3.”

The piece goes into some of the worst possibilities on election day, Nov. 3, including attacks/battles at polling places, foreign disinformation and interference, Trump activating the National Guard. It also mentions some of the worst of the public servants who are instead serving Trump, including Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson. He's up for re-election in 2022. There's also a great bit/edit after Trump discovers generals don't just do whatever he says; there's a higher loyalty:

This shock, and his first two-plus years of struggle with seasoned, expert advisers, led to an insight for Mr. Trump. It all came back to loyalty. He needed to get rid of any advisers or senior officials who vowed loyalty to the Constitution over personal loyalty to him. Which is pretty much what he proceeded to do.

[Break]

In February 2019, William Barr arrived as attorney general ...

I laughed out loud even though it's about the furthest thing from a laughing matter.