1. Aaron Blake: 'Let’s have trial by combat’: How Trump and allies egged on the violent scenes Wednesday

After President Trump began raising objections to his 2020 election loss nearly two months ago, his allies repeatedly assured it was harmless. “If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully,” was the title of an op-ed from former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. An anonymous senior administration official later assured The Washington Post there was little “downside for humoring him for this little bit of time.”

“No one seriously thinks the results will change,” the official said. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”

Those assurances were ridiculed at the time, and that ridicule was entirely vindicated Wednesday. As Congress began to accept the results of the electoral college, Trump supporters stormed the capitol, forcing both chambers to shut down as they were considering the first challenge to the results, from Arizona. Rioters clashed with police and forced their way into buildings and even the floor of Congress. There was broken glass. There was an armed standoff at the door of the House Chamber.

To be clear, this was something Trump and his allies flirted with repeatedly in the day and weeks before it happened — and indeed, not more than a couple hours prior. And the president also expressed approval for what he had seen shortly after the scenes subsided.

At a rally near the capitol earlier Wednesday, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani endorsed the idea of a “trial by combat” — an allusion to something being settled by physical violence rather than evidence. He cited supposed evidence of his baseless voter fraud claims but then turned to a method of justice that had no place for such things.

“If we’re wrong, we will be made fools of,” Giuliani said, despite courts having almost universally found his claims to be wrong. “But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. So let’s have trial by combat.”

Trump appeared soon after Giuliani, encouraging his supporters to head to the Capitol building. Trump told the supporters he wanted them “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” but he has often offered mixed messages on this kind of thing. He has occasionally and suggestively said that supporters might respond with force if they believe the election result is fraudulent, and he has repeatedly alluded that his supporters might wind up being as allegedly violent as his opponents. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/06/lets-have-trial-by-combat-how-trump-allies-egged-violent-scenes-wednesday/

2. Eric Levitz: Impeach and Remove Trump Now

Impeaching and removing Donald Trump from office in the next 24 hours will not redeem the Republican Party which has brought America to the edge of ungovernability. But it is the least they can do in the present moment to unearn every lucid patriot’s contempt.

Trump cannot be allowed the opportunity to pardon his insurrectionaries. He cannot be allowed to carry on using the presidency’s bully pulpit to propagate the incendiary lies that ease his narcissistic injuries at our democracy’s expense. He cannot be allowed to dissolve today’s horror in the acid bath of America’s inveterate amnesia and emerge three years from now as a leading contender for a major-party presidential nomination. He must be evicted from our White House immediately. He must be frog-marched out of our civic life in disgrace.

Republicans have gotten far more than they deserve out of their Faustian bargain with a protofascist. The Supreme Court is theirs for a generation. The billions of dollars in tax cuts are in their patrons’ bank accounts. We on the left like to tell ourselves that history will judge them harshly. But it’s hard to say with confidence that “justice” is where the moral arc of the universe is bending toward these days. So congratulations, McConnell & Co. You played your hand well. Now spare us all another two weeks of democratic backsliding before the U.S. ceases to be a figurative failed state and becomes the literal variety.

And when the Republican leadership declines to do this — when they decline to pay the United States that small courtesy after all that they have taken from it — the incoming Democratic government must recognize their opposition for what it is and fortify our democracy before the GOP gets another opportunity to destroy it. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/01/trump-supporters-capitol-hill-insurrection-impeachment.html

3. Jonathan Chait: Every Trump Loyalist Is Complicit in the President’s Incitement of Sedition

Violence is what he has been promising all along, wafting the scent of blood into the air to goad his supporters. Trump believes that he and his supporters are entitled to threaten and attack journalists and any other people who resist them. When Republican member of Congress Greg Gianforte body-slammed the reporter Ben Jacobs for asking about his stance on Trump’s health care plan,Trump praised him for his toughness.

Later that year, when another reporter asked the president about his atmosphere of threats, Trump growled that violence was a deserved response to critical news coverage. “You know what, you’re creating violence by your question. You are creating. You,” Trump warned. “The fake news is creating violence … I’ll tell you what, if the media would write correctly and write accurately and write fairly, you’d have a lot less violence in the country.”

He has been lamenting the supposed passivity of his supporters and fantasizing openly about the day when their pent-up urges could be unleashed. “I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher, okay” he said in 2019, “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” When armed protesters stormed the Michigan State Capitol and shut down its proceedings, Trump praised their conviction. The state was a laboratory of autocracy, a testing ground for a method Trump was ready to bring to Washington.

Thought precedes action. Trump has never accepted the legitimacy of political and legal restraints on his power. He has failed to overturn the election because he is inept — not because he actually accepts the public’s right to elect his opponent. Accordingly, he delegitimized the election and persuaded his supporters that it was stolen.

The president is an insurrectionist. Those who cooperated in giving him power cannot say they weren’t warned. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/01/trump-mob-incitement-capitol-riot-washington-storm-congress.html

4. Sarah Jones: This Is What Trumpism Without Trump Looks Like

On Wednesday afternoon, as a mob sacked the U.S. Capitol, Donald Trump’s successor pleaded for peace. America was a good place, so much better than what we were seeing today, President-elect Joe insisted.

We’ve triumphed before, and we’ll triumph again. But the platitudes fall flat. So do the shocked tweets and the cable punditry. Trump could stop this with a tweet, people said; this is not who we are. But Trump cannot stop this, because this is who we are. This is who we’ve always been. The sacking of the Capitol is the latest entry in a bloody old ledger.

Trump is not a sophisticated thinker, but he understands a basic truth about America. If you understand the Civil War as a slaveholder’s insurrection, the events of January 6 feel inevitable. This country birthed the Ku Klux Klan and lynched thousands. This country murdered Martin Luther King Jr. This country beat civil-rights protesters and killed trade unionists and Communists and so, eventually, it elected Trump. And the violence was revived. Under Trump, this country killed Jews at worship in 2018, and it targeted Latinos in an El Paso Walmart the very next year. This country gave rise to neo-Nazis in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, and to the murder of Heather Heyer.

Though America has also always been more complex than the ugliest version of itself — it is Heyer’s country, and King’s country, as much as it’s Trump’s — there’s nothing original about the violence his presidency inspires. When we wonder about the future of what we call Trumpism, a loose term for the racist nationalism that defines his presidency, conventional wisdom generally holds that there is no Trumpism without Trump. Without his celebrity, the coalition that coalesced around him would not survive for long. There’s still some truth to that view. But that doesn’t mean the threat Trump poses will pass. The mob that invaded the Capitol carried Trump flags, true, but it carried Confederate flags too. That’s what Trumpism without Trump looks like: old-fashioned white supremacy, outfitted with a new set of grievances. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/01/this-is-what-trumpism-without-trump-looks-like.html

5. Bess Levin: Ivanka, Eric, And Don Jr. Are In Furious Damage Control Mode Following Capitol Hill Siege

As violent supporters of Donald Trump stormed Capitol Hill on Wednesday, in an attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, first daughter Ivanka Trump had a message for them: Remember, we claim to be the “law and order” party, so it wouldn’t look good to hurt the police— but at the end of the day, Princess MAGA loves ya.

“American Patriots,” she wrote, referring to domestic terrorists, “any security breach or disrespect to our law enforcement is unacceptable. The violence must stop immediately. Please be peaceful.” Later, apparently having realized that describing violent fascists as “patriots” might not be great for the ole brand, Ivanka deleted her tweet and tried to claim she abhors the behavior on display today, in an absurd attempt to distance herself from the monsters unleashed by her family. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/01/trump-children-capitol-hill-damage-control

6. Brent Orrell: The Trump Supernova: Lies, Damned Lies, and the End of the GOP

This is the Trump supernova. Like political parties, so-called “degenerate” stars tend to die in a rather spectacular fashion. With some kinds of stars, when the last of the nuclear fuel is consumed, a sudden expansion streams out massive quantities of solar mass and electromagnetic radiation, and often leaves behind a black hole—an object with a gravitational pull so strong that even light cannot escape it. It’s best not to be in the neighborhood when it happens.

Some GOP operatives and pro-Trump commentators are trying to blast their way out of this gravity field, pretending they haven’t been there cheering on a modern Know-Nothing populist movement that has destabilized American politics for the past five years. The Trump presidency is dying, but the explosive energy of Trumpism is about to consume what remains of the institutional GOP.

There’s another thing about supernovae: When a large star explodes, it rapidly builds up new elements, flinging them out into the universe, enabling the formation of new nebulae, asteroids, planets—and even new stars. Whether the conservatism being ejected from the GOP can build new institutions in time to protect American democracy from both populism and one-party rule remains very much in question. https://thebulwark.com/the-trump-supernova-lies-damned-lies-and-the-end-of-the-gop/

7. John Harris: Can Trump still be Trump come Jan. 21? 

The president’s demagoguery with his baseless assertions of a stolen election, and his increasingly erratic behavior since the election, has put an old puzzle in a frightening new light: Does seemingly irrational behavior actually serve a rational purpose? I’m already on record with my hunch — not a prediction! — that Trump will fade faster than most people and probably even he assumes once he no longer occupies the White House. But this is the dominant question hovering over Republican politics. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2021/01/01/ive-got-a-feeling-21-is-gonna-be-a-good-year-491260

8. William Kristol: The Republican party and the conservative movement must now choose: Trump or America

We are in the midst of a genuine constitutional crisis.

Not since 1876—a crisis that followed from a recent civil war, and whose resolution legitimized a disastrous retreat from American principles in at least a part of the reunited nation—have we seen a moment like this. The president of the United States, aided and abetted by major figures in his party, is trying, after the votes have been certified, to overturn the results of the recent election. Major figures in the Republican party seek to hijack legal and legislative forms, and to call people into the streets, against a core element of our constitutional form of government. Just an hour or so ago, we learned of a new presidential phone call that is unequivocally grounds for impeachment.

It is false reassurance to be comforted that these efforts will fail. Because who is to say that these efforts are not a harbinger of things to come? They certainly look more like the future of our politics than a last gasp of a fading past. And what they seem to suggest is that one can have no great confidence that one of our two major political parties will remain a constitutional and republican party. https://thebulwark.com/its-time-to-speak-for-america/

9. Brian Karem: Crimes, Crises, and Coup

The biggest stain left on the fabric of our nation after Donald Trump’s departure will be the stain of acceptance.

Many people on the left and in the middle, along with a few on the right, have fought against his desecration of political and social norms and stood up to his bullying.

But what is striking is how many more Americans have just accepted all of it—the insanity, the narcissism, the lies, and the bullying of the last few years. Millions have adapted to the Trump madness, accepting it as the new normal.

Many even welcomed it, embraced it.

That is true even now, when Trump has lost his re-election bid—and instead of a working president striving to lead the country through the ongoing crisis of the pandemic, we have a whimpering crybaby camped out at Mar-a-Lago who spends his days golfing, tweeting and plotting a coup.

He has not led the effort to vaccinate Americans. “Operation Warp Speed” has become “Operation Turtle Crawl,” as the distribution of vaccines has been appallingly slow and disorganized. Trump has done nothing to use the enormous power of his office to bring speed and order to the process. In fact, he has specifically denied responsibility, fecklessly tweeting that “it is up to the states to administer” the vaccines. As usual, he refuses to accept any responsibility—though he always wants the accolades. https://thebulwark.com/crimes-crises-and-coup/

10. Ronald Brownstein: Republicans Are Going Down a Dangerous Road

Republicans’ tolerance, if not active support, for President Donald Trump’s ongoing bid to overturn the 2020 election has crystallized a stark question: Does the GOP still qualify as a small-d democratic party—or is it morphing into something very different?

Even with the Supreme Court still deciding whether to consider a last-ditch legal effort to invalidate the results from the key swing states, there appears little chance that Trump will succeed in subverting Joe Biden’s victory. But Trump’s failure on that front has obscured his success at enlisting a growing swath of his party to join his cause—a dynamic that is already prompting new Republican efforts to make it more difficult to vote and raising concerns about the party’s commitment to the basic tenets of Western democratic rules and conventions, including the peaceful transfer of power.

“Where their hearts are is hard to know, but their behavior is not small-d democratic,” Susan Stokes, a political-science professor and the director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, told me.

Stokes, like other experts, says the Republican Party is on a continuum toward the kind of “democratic erosion” visible in other countries, including Turkey under Recep Erdoğan, Hungary under Viktor Orbán, or, in the most extreme example, Russia under Vladimir Putin. In those nations, a party that wins office through a democratic election then seeks to use state power to tilt or completely undermine future elections.

“With one of our political parties trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election, we are way farther down that road now than we were before the election, or a year ago,” she told me. Republicans “have been going down that road all through Trump’s term, but this is the parting gift, which is more extreme than what has happened before.” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/12/gops-anti-democratic-bid-overturn-election/617358/

11. Steve Schmidt: 'Shame on Them All'

The Rubicon will be crossed on the 6th. The ruthless and amoral cynicism of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and James Lankford and Josh will be on appalling display. It must be opposed fiercely. It must be recognized for what it is.

Another storm is gathering in the constant struggle between liberty and her enemies. Trump has unleashed the fury and has found his following. It will be a long fight. At the hour of his defeat and defenestration, Trump has done his greatest damage.

This is a movement that is fueled by lies, conspiracies, corruption, greed, extremism, racism, grievance, resentment, cynicism and a profound absence of love for America. It is right to feel anger and contempt toward its leaders and enablers.

There is only one proposition that America’s pro-democracy coalition can offer to these people. “We win-you lose.” It’s that simple.

Sedition is the precise word, and the right word, to describe what we have been witnessing. Never before have so many American leaders betrayed their country. We will watch their eternal disgrace on live TV. The evidence of their ignominy will exist forever, as will the memory of their monumental betrayal. https://www.maxnewstoday.com/post/steve-schmidt-shame-on-them-all

12.  John Cassidy: Trump’s Authoritarian Moment Is Here

After four years of watching experienced Republican politicians prostrating themselves before Trump, it is easy to become inured to the sight, pitiful as it is. But rejecting the duly certified results of a Presidential election goes far beyond everyday bowing and scraping. “The egregious ploy to reject electors may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic,” Mitt Romney, a Republican who himself flirted with working for Trump before turning against him, noted in a statement, on Sunday. “The congressional power to reject electors is reserved for the most extreme and unusual circumstances. These are far from it. . . . I could never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the world. Has ambition so eclipsed principle?”

The question answers itself, and the consequences of the enabling attitude shown by many Republicans are far-reaching. In the short term, it makes it more likely that Trump will escalate his antidemocratic campaign and perhaps even try to involve the military—a possibility that all ten living former Defense Secretaries warned against in an op-ed piece published on Sunday. But, even if Trump is safely ushered out of office on January 20th, the consequences of his behavior over the past few weeks will be long-lasting, particularly for the Republican Party.

Surely, the main motivation of some of the Republicans who have aligned themselves with Trump—Pence, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley—is to bolster their own Presidential hopes in the post-Trump era. However, in giving credence to the President’s baseless claims that he is being cheated out of office, these prominent Republicans are just making it even more likely that, at least as far as the G.O.P. is concerned, there won’t be a post-Trump future but, instead, another lengthy period in which he and his grievance continue to dominate all else.

This is the fate of a Party that has embraced a populist personality cult—Trumpism—which has recently outed itself as what Steve Schmidt, the campaign strategist who advised John McCain in 2008, called over the weekend “an American autocratic movement with Fascistic markers.” Using plainer English, Stuart Stevens, another Never Trump Republican strategist, who advised Mitt Romney in 2012, summed things up on Twitter: “The bottom line is that the @GOP has become a threat to democracy. I spent decades helping elect members of the party and it’s painful to admit. But it’s a clear and present danger and should be treated as such.” This is primarily Trump’s work, but it’s not just Trump’s work. Not by a long shot. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trumps-authoritarian-moment-is-here

13. Paul Krugman: How the Republican Party Went Feral

People have compared the modern G.O.P. to organized crime or a cult, but to me, Republicans look more like the lost boys in “Lord of the Flies.” They don’t get news from the outside world, because they get their information from partisan sources that simply don’t report inconvenient facts. They don’t face adult supervision, because in a polarized political environment there are few competitive races.

So they’re increasingly inward-looking, engaged in ever more outlandish efforts to demonstrate their loyalty to the tribe. Their partisanship isn’t about issues, although the party remains committed to cutting taxes on the rich and punishing the poor; it’s about asserting the dominance of the in-group and punishing outsiders.

The big question is how long America as we know it can survive in the face of this malevolent tribalism.

The current attempt to undo the presidential election won’t succeed, but it has gone on far longer and attracted much more support than almost anyone predicted. And unless something happens to break the grip of anti-democratic, anti-truth forces on the G.O.P., one day they will succeed in killing the American experiment. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/opinion/trump-republican-party.html

14. Jonah Goldberg: How Trump’s moral corruption infects others in his party

Rot extends far outside of Washington. How could it not, for the politicians are merely responding to market incentives, the way weather vanes respond to the wind (even if they helped manufacture the very gales they are responding too)? The consumers — i.e. the voters, viewers, donors and subscribers — want the lies.

A whole industry has grown up around the idea that what is good for Trump — or simply what Trump thinks is good for him — is the premise and conclusion of every argument. From pastors and “constitutional scholars” to journalists and conservative activists, all the conservative yardsticks — of good character, decency, statesmanship, constitutionalism — have been shaved down and bent to fit the crooked timber of the man.

These are the people Trump surrounds himself with. Some were already corrupt, which is why they fluttered, moth-like to his flame in the first place. But others were not always this way. The American right is now littered with Actonian cautionary tales, people trading their reputations for one last bit of relevance.

No wonder Trump’s consternation with the uncorrupted Georgia officials who would not ratify his lies. He pleaded for investigators who “want to find” the evidence he needs, because for Trump and his apologists the truth is defined by his wants and needs.

He won’t stop whining until he gets what he wants, which means he’ll be whining for the rest of his life, and some will call it leadership. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-01-04/donald-trump-republicans-corruption-josh-hawley-ted-cruz

15. LA Times’ Editorial: Devin Nunes doesn’t even belong in the vicinity of the Presidential Medal of Freedom

It’s more than a little ironic that President Trump has decided to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to, of all people, a California congressman who has spent the last few years attacking some of the United States’ most fundamental freedoms — namely, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

But, then again, nothing should surprise us in these last few days of the Trump administration, when the outgoing one-term president has used awards, pardons and other presidential prerogatives to reward his allies and score political points. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-01-05/devin-nunes-presidential-medal