Politics posts

At least via this article from John Hendrickson in The Atlantic. I remember when I didn't even know CPAC existed. Fun times.

Hendrickson says Trump's two-hour, rambling and complaining speech gave off a “1 a.m. at the party” vibe rather than anything  vibrant and angry, and he wondered if this wasn't “the last gasp of CPAC.” In the next sentence, he finally unburied his lede—or at least the most interesting fact about the event: Fox News wasn't there. It wasn't a sponsor. Instead, the thing was sponsored and attended by the grabbag of kooks and grifters that hope to fill Fox's void if Fox ever leaves a void: Newsmax, The Epoch Times, Right Side Broadcasting Network, America First, One America News, Lindell TV, blah blah blah.

According to Trump, the 2020 election was still stolen, the state is still deep, the U.S. is becoming a “crime-ridden, filthy communist nightmare,” and we put up illegal immigrants at the Waldorf Astoria. “My wonderful travel ban is gone,” he lamented at one point. That made me smile, remembering the horror of it. And remember how he always said he was the only one who could fix a seemingly unsolvable problem even though he couldn't solve 2+2? He's latest unsolvable only he can solve is Russia-Ukraine. One assumes by backing Russia:

“I stand here today, and I'm the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent—and very easily—World War III.” (Wild applause.) “And you're gonna have World War III, by the way.” (Confused applause.)

It was Bannon who attacked the true enemy:

Late Friday afternoon, he marched onto the stage in all black, three pens clipped to his shirt, and attacked Fox News for its alleged “soft ban” of Trump. He referred to the Murdoch family as “a bunch of foreigners” and said, “Note to Fox senior management: When Donald J. Trump talks, it's newsworthy.” He fired up the crowd: “We're not looking for unity. We're looking for victory!” He pounded his hand on the lectern, summing up the theme of the weekend: “MAGA! MAGA! MAGA!”

That's dipshit American for “Tora! Tora! Tora!” 

“I know it violates the sensibilities of the innocent and tender-minded, but in the real world you sometimes have to employ extreme and extralegal methods to preserve the very system whose laws you're violating.”

-- G. Gordon Liddy, in a Playboy magazine interview years ago, vis a vis his discussion with other operatives on how to assassinate journalist Jack Anderson. It's detailed in Mark Feldstein's recent article, “The Nixon White House plotted to assassinate a journalist 50 years ago,” in The Washington Post. I know a lot about Nixon, and Watergate, but I never knew this story. Seems insane, and Liddy seems more sociopath than I realized. Feldstein quotes the above after writing, “Liddy offered to stab Anderson to death and make it look like a routine robbery by stealing Anderson's watch and wallet.” Apparently a few days after Howard Hunt briefed Charles Colson on the matter, the hit was canceled, or at least put on pause, so they could bug Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. It's possible that Frank Wills not only helped expose the underbelly of the Nixon administration, he might've saved Jack Anderson's life, too.

“In his recent book Thank You for Your Servitude, my colleague Mark Leibovich quoted a former Republican representative who bluntly summarized his party's plan for dealing with Trump: 'We're just waiting for him to die.' As it turns out, this is not an uncommon sentiment. In my conversations with Republicans, I heard repeatedly that the least disruptive path to getting rid of Trump, grim as it sounds, might be to wait for his expiration.

”Their rationale was straightforward: The former president is 76 years old, overweight, appears to maintain the diet of a college freshman, and believes, contrary to all known science, that exercise is bad for you. Why risk alienating his supporters when nature will take its course sooner or later? Peter Meijer, a former Republican representative who left office this month, termed this strategy actuarial arbitrage.

“'You have a lot of folks who are just wishing for [Trump's] mortal demise,' Meijer told me. 'I want to be clear: I'm not in that camp. But I've heard from a lot of people who will go onstage and put on the red hat, and then give me a call the next day and say, ”I can't wait until this guy dies.“ And it's like, Good Lord.'”

-- from “Republicans' 2024 Magical Thinking,” by McKay Coppins, on The Atlantic site. Coppins adds that though Trump turns 77 this year, his mother lived to be 88, his father 93, “so this strategy isn't exactly foolproof.”

I'm sure it'll all work out fine, GOP.

From “How Trump jettisoned restraints at Mar-a-Lago and prompted legal peril” in The Washington Post:

In the two years since he left office, Trump has re-created the conditions of his own freewheeling White House—with all of its chaos, norm flouting and catering to his ego—with little regard for the law. With this behavior, Trump prompted a criminal investigation into his post-presidential handling of classified documents to compound the ongoing one into his and his allies' efforts to overturn the 2020 election results—which presents potential legal peril and risks hobbling his nascent bid to be elected president again in 2024.

It's the word risks that does it for me. We get his aberrant behavior, his disregard for the rule of law, and the two huge, ongoing criminal investigations against him, and, oh yeah, he's still running for president and we guess all that risks such a run.

I'm not critiquing the writers, by the way. The paragraph perfectly encapsulates our screwed-up times. 

The article is long but good. It's Trump in winter. How he's surrounded himself with only the most sycophantic. How they spend much of their time trying to buoy him up. How he has no one to tell him, “You know, that might not be a good idea.” One former aide describes the situation as “sad”—which, remember, with exclamation point, used to be one of Trump's many Twittery catchphrases back in the day. What goes around. 

More sad for him, good for us: Yesterday, the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attacks formally recommended criminal prosecution for Trump on four counts: inciting insurrection, obstructing an act of Congress, conspiring to defraud the U.S., and conspiring to make a false statement. It's the first time Congress has recommended criminal prosecution for a U.S. president ever. We'll see what DOJ does now. 

“The official campaign for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination is barely three weeks old, but there is one clear takeaway so far: Donald Trump is running against himself—and losing.

”From his low-energy announcement speech at Mar-a-Lago to his dinner with the Hitler-praising Kanye West and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, Trump has courted more controversy than votes since launching his bid in November. He has held no campaign rallies and hired no campaign manager. He has hosted a QAnon conspiracy theorist and helped raise money for the indicted insurrectionists of January 6th. More classified items have been found in his possession, and his Trump Organization was convicted in New York of a major tax-fraud scheme. He has scared away neither prospective opponents nor prosecutors, and, while openly courting extremists, he seems to be running on a campaign platform that is somehow even more nakedly driven by self-interest than his previous two bids. Just last week, he suggested jettisoning the Constitution so he could be reinstated to the office he was thrown out of by the voters in 2020. ... Has there ever been a more awful start to a campaign?

“For all of that, it's not clear just what kind of Trump car crash we're watching. Is this the end-end of Trump, the long-anticipated Republican jailbreak? Or merely another moment when the false hope of Trump's imminent demise is indulged for a few days or weeks before being once again disproved? ... For all the breathless coverage, Trump retains the support of more than 40% of the G.O.P. electorate in recent surveys—more than enough to win the Republican nomination in a crowded field.”

-- Susan B. Glasser, “Trump's 2024 Campaign So Far Is an Epic Act of Self-Sabotage; But is this really the end of an error?” on The New Yorker site

Mike Lukovich, AJC

James Fallow in his substack says pretty much what I think of political prognostication—just better. Certainly more even-handed. Nary a swear word in the bunch.

He's taking the political press to task, particularly The New York Times, for its awful pre-midterm coverage that presaged doom for the Democrats. He also highlights the Times' bias in these matters. 

Midterms tend to go for the party not in power. “Every first-term president since World War II (except one) has suffered midterm election losses,” Fallows writes. “The average loss has been around 30 House seats.” Then he crunches the numbers for those House races. Reminder, this is just for first-term presidents:

• 1962 (JFK): -5
• 1966 (LBJ): -47
• 1970 (Nixon): -12
• 1974 (Ford): -49
• 1978 (Carter): -15
• 1982 (Reagan): -26
• 1990 (Bush I): -7
• 1994 (Clinton): -54
• 2002 (Bush II): +8
• 2010 (Obama): -63
• 2018 (Trump): -41
• 2022 (Biden): -4(?)

I'd forgotten how bad 2010 was—if I ever knew—but chalk it up to right-wing talk radio, and Fox News, and the everpresent fear of a black planet. Plus liberal complacency—mine included.

The point is, first-term midterm losses are all but inevitable. But in 2018, with Trump in office, what was the Times headline? 

EDGE IN POLLS MIGHT NOT TIP HOUSE SCALES: OUTCOME HINGES ON A HANDFUL OF TOSSUPS

A bit of a shrug there. It's the Times with their hands up: Who knows?

And their 2022 headlines with Biden in office? For some reason, the shrug is gone.

MIDTERMS SPUR A RUSH OF ANGST AND CONFIDENCE: G.O.P. SHOWS OPTIMISM AS DEMOCRATS BRACE FOR LOSSES

BIDEN FACES POLARIZED U.S. AS VOTE NEARS: ON TRAIL WITH PARTY'S OUTLOOK BLEAK

I've long been against news prognostication anyway. The news is what's been, not what might be, and what's been is tough enough without muddying the waters. But if you're going to do it, at least try to be even-handed about it. And if you fuck up—in not being even-handed, and in not being accurate—how about a mea culpa? Or a nostra culpa? From the Times so far, crickets.

I had no idea how the midterms would turn out, by the way. The Sunday before, we were in the apartment of Patricia's friend Peter Goldman, who once covered national politics for Newsweek, and I said that outright. I had a better sense of 2016, 2020, even 2018. For this year, I just didn't know what forces would matter more: the post-Dobbs, pro-democracy voice or the usual midterm “I don't like how things are so whatever” voice. Peter was also unsure. We both kind of shrugged. If only the Times had done that. 

I was already enjoying Marc Maron's recent podcast with writer-director Tony Gilroy, who was on, one assumes, because of the new “Star Wars” thing on the Disney channel, “Andor,” which he created, wrote, executive-produced, and which I've heard is good. But Maron doesn't care much for the “Star Wars” thing; he wanted to talk about “Michael Clayton,” which Gilroy wrote and directed back in 2007, and which Maron is obsessed with. That's fun. There are no weeds too deep for Marc Maron on “Michael Clayton.” You could tell he was having a great time talking about it.

But we also get Gilroy's story—how his dad was a playwright, etc., how he write this and the other, including “The Devil's Advocate,” with Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron, and what exactly was the hook in that film that finally worked for him as a screenwriter. Also the insanity of it. Its bigness. Al Pacino eating up scenes. He and Marc are laughing about it when we get this exchange:

Gilroy: Oh my god, and the Trump shit.

Maron: Yeah. [Pause] Was he in there?

Gilroy: Fuck, man, that's his apartment. The killer real-estate dude, the killer real-estate molester, we shot in his apartment, Trump's apartment. We needed the ugliest, most garish, horrifying, real-estate developer apartment you could possibly have, and Trump threw his apartment at us.

Maron: That's right. Ohhh....

Gilroy: And we didn't have to—if you look at the movie, that's his fucking shitbag apartment, with all the Versailles gilt, and then the high-rise windows. It's just so perfect. And he came by the set every day. 

Maron: Really?

Gilroy: Oh yeah. Poke around. 

Maron: What was your impression of him? At that time. Obviously the apartment's the apartment, but--

Gilroy: Look, he was a clown. I grew up in New York. I'd been in New York since 1979, I sat at a table in the China Club with he and Bo Dietl. I'd been around him. Just a fucking clown. You know, just that clown.

Maron: Grifter.

Gilroy: Grifter-clown, kind of loser-outsider. A pretend rich guy. Because, you know, if you live in New York, and I'd been there all this time, and the kids go to school, you're really around titans. 

Maron: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Gilroy: There's some really big arterial power and money. He was not any part of that. 

Maron: And they looked at him like, “Look at this guy.” 

Gilroy: He's lint.

Maron: So you had a deal with him on Devil's Advocate.

Gilroy: He would come by. He would come by on the way down to the office or wherever, peek by, try to see Charlize or whatever the thing he was trying to do. Everyone's laughing at him. Laughing at his apartment. 

Maron: It's so funny he was part of the “Devil” movie. Of course he was. 

A few thoughts.

One, Gilroy sounds a little like Sidney Pollack's character in “Michael Clayton”: I know where the power lies and how the game is played, and these other schmucks don't. And one of those schmucks is the former president.

Two, I love that Maron is interviewer enough to just ask the open-ended question “What was your impression of him?” He's talking about the great villain in Maron's and my life, but he doesn't impose any of that on the question. He pulls back and opens it up. That's the way to do it.

Three is simply a question: Does Donald Trump hear the laughter? Does he do what he does to silence the laughter? Did we all go through the horrors of the last six years, and however many years going forward, because the Tony Gilroys of the world laughed at this dumb, dumpy real estate developer? 

When I first heard this exchange, I wanted to get it in front of all of those idiots who continue to see Trump as a great man, a great businessman, a moral examplar. The 74 million absolute idiots that voted for him. Listening again as I transcribed the above, I realized it was probably the only moment in the last six years where I felt anything close to a pang of empathy for him. 

“I remember, when I was reporting on the book, Mitt Romney said to me, 'One of the first things you learn in politician school is: Don't say something that's going to inflame the random nut out there.' And Donald Trump never got the random-nut memo.”

-- Journalist Mark Leibovich last week on the “Stay Tuned with Preet” podcast. Thought of it again reading Ruby Cramer's excellent piece on the threats on the life of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and other Democratic members of Congress. And it's not just Trump. It's Fox, and right-wing talk radio, and that crowd. I remember after Obama got elected, how Fox News upped the rhetoric against him, and the concern I had for this very reason. Today, the nuts are much more numerous and much less random. 

“On December 18th, Trump hosted Flynn and a group of other election deniers in the Oval Office, where, for the first time in American history, a President would seriously entertain using the military to overturn an election.”

-- from “Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals: How Mark Milley and others in the Pentagon handled the national-security threat posed by their own Commander-in-Chief,” by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, in The New Yorker. Recommended.

The other week I said Mark Leibovich's “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission” was easier to read than, say, Jane Mayer's “Dark Money,” because it's kind of fun finding out how painful the Trump era was/is to most traditional Republicans: the Reince Priebuses and Paul Ryans of the world. Example:

When Trump took office in 2017, there were 241 Republicans in the House, David Wasserman of The Cook Political Report pointed out. “Since then, 115 (48%) had either retired, resigned, been defeated or at that point had signaled plans to retire in 2020.” Anecdotally, the single biggest reason these members gave for walking away was they had no interest in debasing themselves in the service of Trump any longer than they had to. “You have a situation where the leader of our party models the worst behavior imaginable,” another outgoing Republican member of Congress told me. “And if you're a Republican in Washington, the idea is basically to make yourself as much of a dickhead as possible in order to get attention and impress the biggest dickhead of all, the guy sitting in the White House.”

I asked the outgoing congressman—very nicely, even a tad aggressively—whether I could attach his name to this excellent quote. “No fucking way,” he said. Why? “Because a lot of these dickheads are my friends. And I might have to lobby them one day, too.

”I know, it's depressing.“

Reading that and other similar comments, though, some part of my schadenfreude dissipated. Because I realized this on a deeper level: No one in American history has weaponized a greater segment of the American public than Donald Trump. No one. He's turned 35% of America into his private little goon squad.

This past week has underlined this fact. He has threatened to unleash his useful idiots if the DOJ/FBI continues its investigation into the Mar-a-Lago docs. Because after six, seven years, these people still believe his lies. They still attack and threaten those who search for the truth, or who fight to keep America—and them—safe. That's the irony and awfulness. They think Trump is their guy but he's only his own, horrifically his own. Yet they'll flip and flop however far he asks them to: from cries of ”Law and order!“ to cries of ”Kill the FBI!“ From ”Lock her up!“ to ”It's just papers!“ Never have so many been so devoted to someone so worthless.

Will they ever fall away? What would it take? It's a cult. That's the Republican party now: a cult propped up by cowards and opportunists. It's not just depressing, it's beyond depressing. ”I might have to lobby them one day, too." Sure, buddy. And when you look around from that lobbying, when you look beyond your own interests, exactly what kind of country are you standing in? That's the worry.

Read this the other night while finishing Mark Leibovich's book on the cowards and opportunists in the Republican/Trumpian party. It's a sum-up as Trump is letting the door hit his ass on the way out:

Trump's always-low approval ratings—now down in the 30s—were the well-earned product of a toxic personality and now fully disastrous final scorecard: he would leave office as the first president in history to be impeached twice, the first since Hoover to preside over his party's loss of the House, Senate, and White House in a single term, the first president in history to leave office with fewer jobs than he entered with, the indirect cause of (conservatively) thousands of coronavirus deaths, countless international embarrassments, and a nation that felt far more divided and deranged than at any time in decades. Trump was easily the sorest loser, most prodigious liar, and most insufferable whiner in presidential history. And no commander in chief had ever departed the White House with as massive a legal and financial burden as Donald Trump would now face.

And it gets worse—for him. This week the affidavit that led to the FBI retrieval of classified and/or national security documents from Trump's private residence at Mar-a-Lago was made public in very redacted form. (The New York Times has a very helpful annotated version.) What does it show that we didn't suspect? Not much. But it shows it in plain legal language. All of us are learning our government acronyms, too: NARA for National Archives and Records Administration, the dept. that spent much of 2021 and '22 trying to retrieve the 15 or more boxes; NDI for National Defense Information, which was what was in those 15 or more boxes, including SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information), SI (Special Intelligence) and HCS (intelligence derived from human sources or spies). Trump was putting them all at risk—that's how NYT led with it the following day—but the big point is he might have already done so. Allies and operatives might already be dead because of him. He's a sloppy man who put top secret intel in a sloppy place, and the question is still this one: why.

Initially I thought it was just the sloppiness. It was the whiny baby in him who needed to say “MINE!” on the way out. That, by the way, is the best interpretation Republicans can make—that their man is just a whiny spoiled child who grabbed stuff as he pouted his way home. “Well, if you're not letting me win I'm going to take this!” That was my initial thought. But now I'm wondering. There's also vindictive Trump. Maybe he's trying to get back at us, the whole country, for “betraying” him by not letting him win. Then there's bad-businessman Trump, who never did a thing in his life without attempting to monetize it. Those documents had value to our enemies—who were often his friends. Could I perceive a scenario where Trump might think, “Why wouldn't I make money by showing my friends these papers that my enemies, who wouldn't let me win, think are important?” You bet. 

That final scorecard is still in play.

“If it were anyone else but the president, a former president, they would be facing criminal charges now.” 

Former Under Secretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, a defense policy expert, on the national security documents retrieved from the safe of former President Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate by the FBI, on Stay Tuned with Preet (12:10 in).

“The reason Donald Trump is the first former president to be treated like a criminal is that he is the first former president who is a criminal.”

-- Jonathan Chait, “What Is Really Unprecedented Is the Criminality: Republican outrage to the raid on Trump is telling,” in New York magazine. Among the Republicans he quotes berating DOJ and the FBI for upholding the rule of law are Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and National Review, which, Chait reminds us, “treated the FBI's preelection announcement of an investigation into Hillary Clinton, over whether she mishandled classified information with her emails, not as a case of FBI abuse but as a devastating indictment of Clinton, and it was still publishing stories two years later insisting she ought to have been criminally charged.” Trump's actions already go way beyond a private email server. And yet more of the same from the GOP. Another chance to break free and instead they double down.

There is a great Mark Leibovich essay about Trump and his GOP toadies on The Atlantic site, called “The Most Pathetic Men in America: Why Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, and so many other cowards in Congress are still doing Trump's bidding,” which ... right? Right from the start—pathetic, cowards—it doesn't pull punches the way much of the press has done for the last seven years. It's a fucking breath of fresh fucking air and everyone should read it. You get the feeling if the press was this honest, or less dishonest, we wouldn't be where we are.

Turns out it's from Leibovich's upcoming book, “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission,” which I've already ordered.

The essay is both insidery and brutal—a good combo. Leibovich is protecting no source. Here's a standalone graf that'll serve as a primer:

Trump said and did obviously awful and dangerous things—racist and cruel and achingly dumb and downright evil things. But on top of that, he is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily the sorest loser, the most prodigious liar, and the most interminable victim ever to occupy the White House. He is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history's stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end. Seriously, what public figure in the history of the world comes close? I'm genuinely asking.

For the last seven years everyone's pretended that this is a legitimate figure, a legitimate American leader, but this is the world as I see it, the world—I would argue—that's closer to what is actually true. And it's fucking time someone fucking said it.

Then he gets into the lies, and the lying liars: the ones who legitimized this crybaby, the GOP, particularly Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy, whom he dubs “the doormat duo.” He doesn't pretend they're the same. Graham has always had the need to glom onto a father figure, and for the first two decades of his career that was John McCain, and for the last five it's been McCain's opposite, Donald Trump, and this massive contradiction has never seemed one on Graham's little head. McCarthy, meanwhile, comes off as just another sad, dull opportunist, but more so. Both men want power, want to stay in power, want to be relevant. Country be damned. 

Both men, in the parlance, get the joke:

“Getting the joke” is a timeworn Washington expression, referring to a person's ability to grasp a shared truth about something best left unspoken. In the case of Trump, the “joke” was that he was, at best, not a serious person or a good president and, at worst, a dangerous and potentially criminal jackass.

“Oh, everybody gets the joke,” Mitt Romney assured me in early 2022 when I asked him if Senate Republicans really believed what they said in public about how wonderful Trump was. “They still are very aware of his, uh, what's a good word, idiosyncrasies.”

Yes, politicians will sometimes say different things in front of different audiences. No big shocker there. But the gap between the public adoration expressed by Trump's Republican lickspittles and the mocking contempt they voiced for him in private could be gaping. This was never more apparent, or maddening, as in the weeks after the 2020 election. “For all but just a handful of members, if you put them on truth serum, they knew that the election was fully legitimate and that Donald Trump was a joke,” Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, told me last year. “The vast majority of people get the joke. I think Kevin McCarthy gets the joke. Lindsey gets the joke. The problem is that the joke isn't even funny anymore.”

And 80 million people aren't in on the joke. If the Dems don't use this to talk to Republican voters directly, they're nuts. “They're in on the joke and you're not. Maybe, to them, you are the joke.”

Everybody in the GOP “got the joke,” and everybody in the GOP “humored him” after he lost the 2020 election, hoping he would simmer down, or maybe he would eventually just leave the stage and life would return to what it was. Then Jan. 6 happened. Lebovich says what I said/hoped back then: “January 6 had to be the end of the line for Trump, right? Surely, this would be the moment when the fever broke.” 

Leibovich tags the moment the fever returned: McCarthy's groveling visit to Mar-a-Lago on January 28:

So, there they were, Donald and his Kevin, side by side again, reunited and it felt so good. In the photo that shot across social media, the old besties held the same clenched smiles and seemed to both be sucking in their tummies like bros of a certain age do. McCarthy's visit set off a parade of ring-kissing pilgrimages. Graham headed down to Florida again and again, so often that his host couldn't help but marvel, “Jesus, Lindsey must really like to play golf”...

And there we were. And there we are. 

“When we look back, Kevin's trip to Mar-a-Lago will, I think, turn out to be a key moment,” Liz Cheney told me when we talked again this April. It would, she said, go down as one of the most shameful episodes in one of the country's most shameful chapters. More than anyone, McCarthy ensured that the Republican Party would remain stuck in its 2020 post-election purgatory, still working to placate America's neediest man.

The book comes out July 12.

Yesterday afternoon, after a day spent reading about SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade 6-3, and how Justice Thomas' decision bodes poorly for other precedents like gay marriage (and interracial marriage, Clarence?), I walked over to Lake Washington on a sky-blue day listening to Ezra Klein and Jamelle Bouie have a smart conversation about the Jan. 6 hearings and whether Donald Trump can and should be charged with crimes.

Main takeaways:

• We're as much a nation of norms and formalities as we are a nation of laws, and Donald Trump shattered those norms and formalities. They're out there for anyone to use and abuse now. They don't go back in. 
• Bouie in particular goes into how the founders hedged their bets on democracy by building into the process, for example, the electoral college, with state electors, rather than we the people, casting the true ballots. This is one of those formalities that Trump tossed into the dungheap. “Oh, there's no law preventing an elector from switching their vote? It's just on the honor system?” That's a wide-open lane for someone like Trump who has no honor.
• The two go into the whole right-wing “We're not a democracy, we're a republic” bullshit, and what's being truly said.
• They also talk about how indicting a former president sets a dangerous precedent; and how, given everything Trump has done, it's much more dangerous to do nothing.

Anyway, smart conversation on another dumb day for America.