Welcome Back to Pottersville: 18 Men (and Women) on a Dead Man's Chest

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

Honestly and simply, in decades of covering politics, I've never seen anything like this.

As a young man watching with slow motion horror at the sledgehammering Reagan had put the middle class and unions through then as a middle-aged man watching Bush II do the same thing, only with less intelligence, I've been watching the GOP's incremental crawl then goose-stepping toward fascism. But never in my most sweat-soaked fever dreams did I ever imagine that the Republican Party would ever turn into this.

Because, not even in its most wild-eyed and full-throated zealotry have I ever seen a president or any Republican so thoroughly subsume their own party. In his most recent article, Tom Hartmann compared Trump's effect on the GOP to "a parasitic wasp... to a caterpillar". He'd elsewhere compared it to cordyceps, the fungal infection made famous by the runaway hit, The Last of Us.

That's really the best way to describe Trump's Svengali-like effect on a major political party, one that would've horrified progressive Republican presidents like Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. What makes this transformation even more improbable is that this formerly relevant political party's shameful subsumption was at the hands of a fucking idiot who can't even pronounce "Nepal" ("nipple"), "Bhutan" ("button"), Or "Yosemite" ("Yo Semite").

Or, to put a finer point on it, consistently spells "stolen" as "stollen", spells "hamburger" as "hamberder", thought he could buy Greenland and that we could nuke hurricanes out of existence. Oh, and that the most virulent plague to hit humanity in a century would just magically go away despite the fact it was killing thousands of Americans a day.

So, Donald Trump, he of the six bankruptcies, three marriages and four indictments and arrests in five months, is not smart and he's not ingenious. Having canny, cynical powers of appraisal when calculating purely transactional relationships should in no way be interpreted as intelligence any more than it should be ascribed to those parasitic wasps or cordyceps fungus that attacks host insects.

How, then, to explain Donald Trump's near supernatural hold on the GOP? Well, we're unlikely to get any satisfactory resolution on that in this lifetime even if an army of political scientists fight with hammers and tongs over it. But observe the lead image above.

That screengrab was taken just seconds after GOP debate moderator Martha McCallum asked the eight candidates on stage, the day before Trump's fourth arrest in five months, if they would still support a Trump nomination even if he was a convicted felon. Only the two men on the left, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and former NJ governor Chris Christie, kept their hands down.

The Devil Went Down to Georgia

At the time I began writing this article, Donald Trump was just pulling into Fulton County's infamous jail with his bloated armored entourage for, again, his fourth arrest and booking in just five months. At this moment, pundits are awaiting that long-coveted mug shot with baited breath, slavering for the chance to be the first one to make a funny meme out of it and to post it to their Twitter account or favorite anti-Trump Facebook group. And let's not forget an army of very funny and inventive boutique entrepreneurs just quivering to put it on coffee mugs, tee shirts and mouse pads.

At last count, an even dozen conspirators or co-conspirators have surrendered for booking in Fulton County, leaving seven more scrambling to make the noon deadline tomorrow. Unlike more laissez faire prosecutors who have been treating Trump with kid gloves, not taking or releasing his mug shots, allowing him to be released on his own recognizance, etc., Fulton County DA Fani Willis isn't fucking around and neither is the judge, Steve Jones.

Several of Trump's cronies have petitioned the court for preferential treatment, letting their white privilege show loud and proud. Meadows demanded more time, demanded the case to be moved to federal court. Jeffrey Clark whined about being "rushed". Fani Willis gave them a week and a half to surrender themselves and that was more generosity, respect and deference than any of them deserve.

As one can expect of the Sociopath in Chief, he's not helping any of his fellow co-defendants with their legal bills. Despite taking in over a quarter of a billion dollars in the first year after he lost the election, $100,000,000 in the first week after he left office, he's once again strapped for cash to the point where literally 75% of his donations are getting eagerly stuffed into the bottomless, bulging pockets of his attorneys. Meanwhile, the rest of the defendants are selling their homes and embracing that dreaded socialism in soliciting legal defense donations.

Which, as George Conway and Michael Cohen recently said, is a pretty stupid tack to take with so many people who know where so many bodies are buried. Especially as putting the arm on these crooks and liars is going to result in several plea agreements in which they exchange their freedom for testimony against the fat man who hung them out to dry.

No, this post was never supposed to be about the sorry shit show that was last night's debate. Nothing was said that would make the needle move away from Trump. And six of the eight Republicans on that stage ensured it wouldn't move by essentially signaling defeat months before the Iowa caucus on January 15th and saying they would accept a failed criminal mastermind as their best chance to defeat Biden.