* Impeachment reality: Feb. 9 is better than this week to kick start the trial. But a few more weeks would be even better. Any chance of something resembling an across-the-aisle reset and actually working with Mitch McConnell and company–from the COVID relief package to the role of the filibuster--would be at least improved. Not everything can be done via executive orders. But further delay or not, the trial–for insurrection incitement–remains necessary, even without a conviction, which, frankly, would require too many GOPsters to grow a spine over night.
* There’s still talk among the usual suspects of a Trump comeback via a “Patriot Party.” History is not encouraging. Third party presidential candidates tend to be political spoilers who take votes away from others. Think George Wallace and Ross Perot. In short, if a competent, respected former president such as Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t pull it off in 1912 with his “Bull Moose” Party, this vile, twice-impeached ex-president won’t succeed with a Bull Sh*t Party in 2024.
* Harbinger hell: That’s what the white nationalist “Unite the Right” Charlottesville rally in the summer of 2017 has become.
* Hardly surprising that when the nation was gearing up for the Inauguration, Donald Trump was at Joint Base Andrews boarding Air Force One for MAGA-Lago. Why hang around for an inauguration that will focus on the “winner” and further undermine your brand? And no surprise that the PA system played Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” In a way, it was his way–to the arrogant, classless end.
* “We will be back in some form”: exit quote from the Oval Office evictee. May it be via an indictment.
* “The mob was fed lies, they were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like.”–FORMER Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
* “Trumplicans”: Trump Republicans who still contend that Biden didn’t win the election fairly.
* The old normal: Schadenfreude is never nice, but it did seem more appropriate that international headlines, videos and photos of police and rioters were from Pushkin Square in Moscow and not from the Capitol in Washington. The former involved thousands of protesters battling riot police over the jailing of Putin-opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The latter involved thugs, punks and anarchists assaulting democracy in the disgraced name of their authoritarian cult leader.
* Imagine, we have an empathetic, decent, unity-agenda president taking over amid the crushing tandem of a death-stalking pandemic and economic crisis, and America can’t really count on Congress, still burdened with too many self-serving, “anti-socialist,” white-grievance politicians, to do all in its power to help out fellow Americans. Too bad there’s no vaccine for unpatriotic malpractice.