A Dark Memorial Blotting Out the Miami Skyline

I once wrote back at the end of trump's first turn at destroying America about how even as a failed president occupant of the White House he was entitled to a library in his dishonor. Even then, I dismissed the prospect because of several points (some of which proved prophetic):

Another thing to consider is the overall mess trump's administration has been. Archivists, historians, and other observers have been complaining about the lack of effective record-keeping in his offices. A combination of understaffing and unqualified hires contributed to a disorganized management system. When you consider the possibility of half the things trump and his cohorts did in the White House - the way they broke the immigration policies and committed potential human rights abuses towards children, for God's sake - we're facing the possibility that half the documentation for trump's would-be library will be missing, destroyed, or redacted into solid pages of black lines...

As a Presidential Museum, of course, it would make perfect sense. The museum won't need to answer to the demands of history or accuracy: the trump Museum would be a grand display of trump's narcissism. Every nook, room, and hallway filled with garish, gaudy tributes to trump's "greatness". A performance hall with a stage dedicated to any speaker offering praise and holiest-of-thous to a con artist, an assembly dedicated to the greed and graft of a corrupt overlord.

It's why I don't see a future trump Library as being anything more than an oversized gift store: Balanced between a Far Right bookstore selling trump ghost-written hagiographies at 100 bucks a cover, and a South Florida tourist trap shilling MAGA beach towels and trump-signed golf clubs...

With trump's return to office, the prospect of his Library getting done became more likely, and with trump basically claiming Florida as his place of power it was unavoidable that my home state is absorbing the potential damage of hosting it (via Kate Payne at AP News): 

A judge in Miami has dismissed a complaint challenging a college’s decision to gift prime downtown real estate for President Donald Trump’s future presidential library, clearing the way for the real estate developer-turned-president to build a towering monument to his political rise in an iconic stretch of the city.

A local activist brought the lawsuit against Miami Dade College, arguing the school’s board didn’t give sufficient public notice and violated the state’s open government law when board members voted in September to give away the nearly 3-acre (1.2-hectare) property in downtown Miami.

The site is a developer’s dream and is valued at more than $67 million, according to a 2025 assessment by the Miami-Dade County property appraiser. One real estate expert wagered that the parcel — one of the last undeveloped lots on a palm tree-lined stretch of Biscayne Boulevard — could sell for hundreds of millions of dollars more...

After the college first voted in September to transfer the property to a fund controlled by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet, the GOP officials voted to transfer the land again, effectively putting the property under the control of the Trump family when they deeded it to the foundation for Trump’s library. That foundation is led by three trustees: Eric Trump; Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos; and the president’s attorney, James Kiley.

Eric Trump has pledged the future library will be “one of the most beautiful buildings ever built” and “an Icon on the Miami skyline.” Under local zoning rules, the best use of the property would be a towering condo building, according to one Miami real estate expert, who described the site as a potential “cash cow.”

That the local developers are picturing the library to be more of a condo seems apt considering how trump and his family view property as money machines for their own pockets. /sigh

As for Eric trump's promise to make the library "one of the most beautiful buildings ever built," you have to remember that the trump ideal of "beauty" is oversized crassness, and this week's preliminary reveal of what they want the library to be wasn't that shocking (horrifying, yes, but not shocking). As Cameron Adams at the Daily Beast documents:

President Donald Trump has shared the first images of his latest vanity building—a book-free library that includes a tacky golden statue of himself and shiny gold escalators.

The first look at the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, to be constructed in Miami, Florida, suggests the building will be firmly on brand for the 79-year-old. It is a mammoth skyscraper with ‘TRUMP’ emblazoned near the top and images of the American flag.

"Book free". Yeah. /Librarian headdesking

An apparently AI-generated video shows multiple aircraft housed inside the library, as well as what appear to be replicas of the White House’s Oval Office and the president’s yet-to-be-built ballroom, as well as a huge gold statue of Trump in what looks like an auditorium.

Linked from the Daily Beast article.

"ALL HAIL THE GOLDEN IDOL! ALL HAIL trump! HAIL! HAIL!"

The president’s son Eric breathlessly posted that he had “poured my heart and soul” into the project over the past six months.

“This landmark on the water in Miami, Florida will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known,” he said on X... 

There's an AI-generated video - which just adds to the tackiness of the presentation - to which I don't want to link. I will share a few more pictures at least.

All images linked from the Daily Beast.

It's all just one big placard for trump's name and likeness, isn't it?

Also note how high this skyscraper is going: it's planned to be the tallest building in Miami, which is already a flat landscape due to Florida's geography. You couldn't avoid it even from the safe distance of Broward County, I'd wager.

I'd also wonder about the all-glass exterior, which can be common among Florida skyscrapers but not at that height, and not at the expense of whichever Category 5 hurricane decides to hit the place.

One more thing I just remembered: Can the ground support the weight of such a structure? It's not the bedrock of Manhattan Island, and South Florida runs the risk of collapsing buildings in this day and age.

One last thing to remember is how trump and his kids are grifters of the lowest order: Anything that can make them money while they produce little to no results. Early "fundraising" shakedowns have raised concerns:

This month, congressional Democrats including Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote to ABC, Meta, Paramount, and X requesting details about the money they pledged to Trump’s library project as part of their legal settlements, The Washington Post reported.

“Now it is unclear where this money has gone, exacerbating concerns about corruption that were apparent at the time of the settlement,” the lawmakers wrote.

The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund was originally set up to manage the money, but was dissolved last year.

A second nonprofit fund, called the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, Inc., was then established. The fund reported in December 2025 that it had received $50 million, though it did not confirm whether that sum includes the legal settlement funds...

There's no guarantee that trump's fundraising is actually going into this tower of triteness. I wouldn't trust anyone in this project with doing any fundraising to build a parking garage in Miami, which would be of greater value than this blight.

All this seems to me is - yet again - trump eager to build an oversized, underused monument to his own decaying corrupt ego, one that will likely get torn down the second he's out of power because nobody else really needs it.

Screaming Into the Void

I went to bed early on Election Night because I didn't want the stress to get the worst of me.

I wake up to a goddamn nightmare.

I thought the worst case nightmare of a trump "win" was that he was going to fight legal challenges all the way up to the Supreme Court. I didn't consider even the possibility trump would claim more popular votes than Harris. trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by three million votes, and lost it more by seven million in 2020. trump had done nothing to improve his favorability numbers in all that time, and yet... what the hell?

And it's not that trump's winning by garnering a higher count than the 74 million he got in 2020: his current total is below that (last saw it was 71 million) and even after all the final tallying is done by this weekend it doesn't look like it'll be any higher than that 74 million from last time.

What's horrifying is how Kamala's vote total - based off the 81 million Biden got earlier - dropped off a literal cliff down to 66 million(!). That total should increase slightly during the final ballot counting, but there's no way she's finding 15 million votes hiding away under a sofa or something to regain the popular vote or flip the Electoral College. This is... wrong. This is broken.

WHERE THE HELL DID 15 MILLION DEMOCRATIC VOTES GO?

This was after all the reports of increased voter registration, this was after all the early voting reports of higher turnout. Pennsylvania and Florida in particular were reporting big turnout overall. There were few signs that the turnout numbers were favoring trump or Republicans. If anything, most of the turnout numbers were matching - if not exceeding in some states - 2020 numbers. AND YET. There's 15 million votes unaccounted for.

This can't be right.

By all accounts, Harris ran the final stages of the campaign - taking over from President Biden when he dropped out from media pressure to do so - just right. She fundraised better than trump. Her rallies drew bigger crowds. The ground game was knocking on every door in the battleground states and then some. There weren't any signs from the voting base itself that they disapproved of Harris (other than the pro-Palestinians fearing the year-long war Israel was inflicting on the Gaza and West Bank citizenry).

There wasn't any evidence that turnout was going to drop this bad. Where the hell did 15 million voters from 2020 go?

Other than grappling at the conspiracy train of thought that the voting machines were rigged - across every battleground state, even the ones where Democrats held local control - the only other thought is that all that voter turnout was a mirage, or that voters avoided marking off a choice for President on the ballots either way.

Looking at the results nationwide, it's not as though that 15 million votes went towards the Libertarian or Green candidates (the Libertarians had barely 540,000 votes, and the Greens got 611,000). Those 15 million votes are just... gone.

What the hell happened to the 81 million voters who showed up for Biden where 15 million of them refused - in an election that could have stopped a known felon and sex offender in trump - to show up for Harris?

This is both frustrating and alarming as hell.

And now we're stuck in hell.

I am regretting ever getting this emotionally invested into my nation's own well-being and survival against the forces of darkness that trump (and his BFF Putin) represent.

For a long time, I thought the Far Right was too extreme, too cruel, too corrupt to truly represent what the United States could be (even with all the racism and sexism dripping through our history books).

I believed the Republican Party wasn't truly reflective of the majority of Americans - not since the 1990s when the sheen of Reaganism fell away - and that they were really a minority party surviving on gerrymandering and voter suppression. The possibility that massive voter suppression happened last night is there, but on this scale? Considering how so many Americans ARE happy voting for a known criminal felon, tax fraud, and sex offender in trump, the only honest reality is that GODS HELP US a majority of Americans are truly this blind, truly this cruel, truly this spiteful towards their own communities and families.

I'm despairing for the poor, for the Blacks facing law enforcement crackdowns to serve trump's obsession for violence against them, for the Latinos and Arabs about to suffer hardships under a vicious anti-immigrant regime, for the women who are about to lose even more rights to an evangelical mob, for the children about to see their personal lives and their safety violated by anti-trans and anti-gay haters.

I'm not despairing for America though. Those sons of bitches voted for a monster about to blow everything up to feed their fear and hate, and they will get caught in the chaos and destruction they thought was going to inflict everyone else.

Goddamn us tonight. History and humanity will never forgive us.

trump STILL The Worst Person America Ever Knew: 2024 Edition

Just as a reminder this Presidents' Day in the United States that donald trump was one of the worst to ever sit in the Executive office (via Peter Baker at the New York Times (paywalled)): 

A new poll of historians coming out on Presidents’ Day weekend ranks Mr. Biden as the 14th-best president in American history, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and Ulysses S. Grant. While that may not get Mr. Biden a spot on Mount Rushmore, it certainly puts him well ahead of Mr. Trump, who places dead last as the worst president ever.

Indeed, Mr. Biden may owe his place in the top third in part to Mr. Trump. Although he has claims to a historical legacy by managing the end of the Covid pandemic; rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure; and leading an international coalition against Russian aggression, Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Mr. Trump from the Oval Office.

trump was already having a bad month, so... this just piles it on.

“Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” wrote Justin Vaughn and Brandon Rottinghaus, the college professors who conducted the survey and announced the results in The Los Angeles Times.

Mr. Trump might not care much what a bunch of academics think...

Trust me, Pete, trump is a raging self-absorbed narcissist. Of course he cares what other people think, it's what drives his fear and his anger.

...but for what it’s worth he fares badly even among the self-identified Republican historians. Finishing 45th overall, Mr. Trump trails even the mid-19th-century failures who blundered the country into a civil war or botched its aftermath like James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce and Andrew Johnson.

This poll is a follow-up of sorts to the one that came out in 2021, when trump fled from the Oval Office and the damage of his tenure more tangible. It's telling that in the brief period of reflection of the last three years, few if any historians are willing to give trump some credit or improvement over the terrible mediocrities - the 19th Century disasters that were Buchanan, Pierce, and Johnson (no, the first one) - that are long gone.

There are no signs in the United States of long-term effects remaining from trump's misrule (other than the madness of his rabid MAGA base escalating their Culture War on our schools). Of the things he did that left an impact - such as signing away Afghanistan to the Taliban at the very end of his presidency - none of it was for the better.

That trump is eagerly running again for the Presidency bodes ill for the nation. It's not because trump wants to undo his terrible legacy, he wants to add to it. And he's not running for the benefit of his followers or even the nation as a whole: trump is running this 2024 so he can use the legal immunity of the Executive office to keep his orange ass out of jail.

Gods help us. We dare not let him back into the Oval Office. trump will be worse than he was before. And that term of office was shockingly bad.

For the LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY, America. Vote Biden. Vote Democratic Party in every spot on the ballot.

A Quick Reminder How BAD trump Was As We Head Into 2024

Saw this on Twitter (screw your X, Elon) and needed to share:

The thing that gets me about Trump is that not only is he a terrible person and his policies mostly just jumbled nonsense. It’s that he’s a terrible administrator- people seemed to have memory-holed how dysfunctional his Administration was. Nobody who worked for him praises him.

— Aaron Astor (@AstorAaron) February 2, 2024

Every tell-all book, every post-administration interview of trump's Cabinet members and advisors, every single story we got out of those dark years told us how trump would berate and belittle his own people, insult them to their faces, mock their expertise. trump drove half his staff to resign every six months by my recollection, and the ones who stayed on the whole tenure were doing so to manage their own grifts.

trump was an agent of chaos, unlike any other Active-Negative force we had sitting in the Oval Office. The likes of Nixon, Johnson, Hoover, Wilson... at least they maintained some form of self-discipline and awareness.

Even if trump fails to make himself dictator should he ever cheat his way back into the White House, his failures as a leader will tear this nation apart for good. We barely survived the last time.

For the LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY, America, do NOT vote trump this 2024.

 

History In This Moment Where A Con Man Finally Faces Justice

Headline at NBC News (via Jonathan Dienst):

Law enforcement agencies are prepping for a possible Trump indictment as early as next week

Multiple agencies are discussing potential security plans for in and around the Manhattan Criminal Court in case Trump is charged in connection with an alleged hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.

Local, state and federal law enforcement and security agencies are preparing for the possibility that former President Donald Trump will be indicted as early as next week, according to five senior officials familiar with the preparations.

An honest word to describe all this is "Historic."

It was historic back in 2016 when the United States elected - through a broken Electoral process where he lost the Popular vote but won enough states - a person in donald trump who had never before held elected or nominated office.

It was historic that our nation invited into the White House a corrupt con man with a history of civil court cases, criminal allegations, and other misdeeds to where it can honestly be said trump was the most corrupt person to enter the Presidency.

Yell and scream all you want about the other Presidents of our times, but how many of them were honest-to-God as crooked as trump? trump was going into the White House after 2016 with serious allegations of money laundering from the 1980s and onwards, a series of failed bankruptcies that should have exiled him from the business community (or at least should have convinced banks to stop lending him money), and was even embroiled in a civil suit regarding fraud with his failed "Trump University" by the time he put his hand on a Bible to swear an Oath of Office he never took serious.

Remember all the trump rally chants in 2016 screaming "Lock Her Up" about the allegedly corrupt Hillary Clinton? All those investigations into her and not trump (not until it was too late)? Turns out Hillary never crossed the lines, never broke the law as her critics and haters accused. Even her Clinton Foundation that was attacked as a "fake" non-profit? It's still running, while trump's clearly fake non-profit was shut down for trump's abuse of non-profit regulations.

Remember all the Far Right demagogues convinced that Obama was crooked? Not just his "illegal" status arguing over his Hawaiian birth certificate, but attacking him on any other allegations of fraud and misconduct. Remember Solyndra? Investigations found it was the company that was corrupt, not Obama. And yet, the Tea Party (proto-MAGA) mobs howled for Obama to face their "justice".

There were - still are - a lot of angry Liberal Democrats railing against George W. Bush, especially as the War of Terror shifted from avenging 9/11 towards an uncalled and costly invasion/occupation of Iraq. When Putin just got tagged by the international courts for War Crimes against Ukraine, a lot of social media replies fell along the lines of "Now do Bush." But it should be noted that the Democrat who followed Dubya into the White House - Obama - did not pursue war crimes (or any other allegations of corruption) as a legal matter, not even pursuing it as a partisan method of punishing the Neocon pro-war Republicans. For all the evidence of human torture and battlefield atrocities happening under Bush the Lesser's watch, there did not seem to be enough for a sustainable indictment (or at least not enough to prevent the collapse of half our military and intel agencies if we did pursue it).

There were a lot of angry Liberals when Bush the Elder pardoned every major figure involved in Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, closing the lid on that particular criminal matter, but even then the criminal allegations barely reached either Reagan or Bush, and calls for their arrests stayed on the fringes.

If you're buying into donald trump's claims that every criminal investigation is a WITCH HUNT and every prosecutor is doing so for partisan (and racist) political points, you'll have to explain why these sort of things never happened to every other former President in modern times. The closest we've ever gotten to any President under criminal investigation was Richard Nixon, facing tax evasion, obstruction, and other criminal charges in the wake of his resignation after Watergate. It took Gerald Ford's pardon - in Ford's earnest attempt to end the "long national nightmare" of scandal - to avoid that particular mess, and even then there was enough evidence for a case and a lot of Americans who preferred Nixon face his sins in a courtroom.

Look at trump's efforts to apply that belief - that partisan politics motivate criminal charges towards our political figures - to his political enemies Obama and Hillary. trump pushed for investigations into his claims he was unfairly persecuted by Obama's Justice Department, and that Hillary was corruptly dealing with others to steal the 2016 elections from trump. All of that wrapped into John Durham's special counsel investigations... that proved none of trump's claims and exposed Durham as a fool (or worse).

If you're buying into the most honest, simplest explanation into why trump is facing criminal (and civil) charges on a scale before never placed upon a political figure in American politics, it's because America never before had a con artist crook like trump operating on such a criminal scale before reach our highest political office.

All of these grand jury investigations - not just in New York involving his corrupt business practices, but also Georgia involving trump's attempt to influence the vote count in 2020, and in DC involving his call to insurrection and riot on January 6th - can't be happening without honest-to-God evidence, witnesses to his (and others) involvement, proof that something criminal took place. Durham had no evidence except for trump's gaslighting, and look where that got him. NYC prosecutors have evidence that trump paid off people to cover up his acts of adultery leading into 2016, and they've got to a grand jury to deliberate.

This is all historic because we've never had a corrupt con artist reach this high before.

This will all be historic when the indictments finally come down, because trump's panicked reactions to every criminal charge will trigger both celebration and riot.

Gods help us. The week of March 20-25 will be one of the most chaotic in our nation's history. As unsettling as September 11th and about as farcical as the Lorena Bobbitt trial.

The cops may try to get ready for it but I doubt the rest of us can.

Update: Infidel753 has a few thoughts, mostly concerns about how this will either inspire trump's supporters to vote for him in 2024, or leave the Republican primary race in the hands of DeSantis, who threatens to be worse and could win because the media are ignoring the warning signs about DeSantis' assaults on free speech.

History Is Already Judging trump (w/ Update)

(Update: Many thanks to Jon Perr at Crooks&Liars for offering up this article to Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please check out the other articles here, and keep an eye out for Sunday because I like to do a FOUR FOR THE 4TH blogging run on Independence Day!)

This took up a bit of Twitter conversation today (up until the bombshell news of Cosby walking out of jail for his sex crimes). C-SPAN, the all-politics cable network, hosted a 2021 polling of Presidential Historians (damn, I did not get a phone call from them after my 2013 character reviews, I need to file for credentials to get on the next poll) that covered everyone from Washington to trump to see who ranked best and worst. Biden doesn't get graded yet because his term hasn't finished: It is also nice to see two of the ones who served the shortest terms - William Henry Harrison and James Garfield - get considered.

If you looked at the polling parameters, C-SPAN did a pretty good job of breaking down the factors ranging from economic policy to foreign policy to intangibles of leadership (persuasion, morality to name two). Working all of that together, and you get a list that puts donald trump down in the Bottom Five of Utter Failure.

I do think JFK's a little too high on this list...

No sign of the Shitgibbon yet...

THERE he IS! Tied with Pierce...

I know I am a bit biased when it comes to seeing trump dead last in any polling, but alas Historians take their business of judging history serious, so they had to give The Loser Of the Popular Vote (Twice) a fair shake. trump STILL ended up nowhere near the pinnacle of greatness he kept shilling himself to be.

If there are any surprises for me, it's that James Monroe isn't ranked higher, Coolidge and JFK both seem ranked a little too high IMHO, and my boy Chester A. Arthur needs a better agent. But I am not at all surprised at how low trump is held in esteem by those who study history and politics and who have a pretty good idea by now who merits acclaim and who gets the scorn.

If you've read just this blog alone, you'll have tracked a number of moments where trump failed this nation in terms of handling crises, in terms of persuasion, in terms of competency, in terms of coherent foreign policy, all of that. And this is all coming from a guy who's technically an amateur, I'm writing all of this as a hobby of sorts, personal venting, that sort of thing. You should notice this polling is with the professionals weighing in, with a better understanding of the Presidency and its effects on our present character and future direction. And man, they know trump sucked. 

When the only ones graded Worst than you (trump at 41st) are Andrew Johnson (43) and James Buchanan (44) and you tied with Franklin Pierce (42), you really need to re-evaluate your place in the universe. Dude, the guy who died in thirty days ranked higher (40) than you! (Addendum: The three worst all happen to be the Presidents who did the most damage either leading into the Civil War or during Reconstruction: Pierce aggressively pushing the hated Fugitive Slave Act; Buchanan enforcing the hate Dred Scott and contributing to Bloody Kansas instead of calming it, as well as dereliction of duty during the winter of 1860 when the secessionists seized federal forts and armaments; and then Johnson who threw away the early gains of Civil War victory, sabotaging Reconstruction and sowing the future for Jim Crow segregation for another 100 years.)

I work in a library. Ever since 2016, there have been a number of books about trump, about his campaign and his character and his administration and the utter chaos and madness he brought to both our nation and the world. Right now, we're getting a slew of preorders of titles written by Beltway journalists and esteemed historians critiquing the trumpian era (it takes about six to eight months from January for the postmortems to get edited and sent to galleys). For every one Far Right book I see on the distributors' lists, there's about five to seven books detailing the sins and follies of trump's White House.

History is already judging trump.

Yet the damn Republican Party thinks he's still a winner, that they can campaign again for him in 2024.

Gods help us if that ever happens (again).

Down In the History Books

Nixon: Dare I ask, will I be remembered?

Eleventh Doctor: Oh, Dicky. Trick Dicky. They're never going to forget you.

-- "Day of the Moon"

Never happened to John Tyler, although Congress tried. Never happened to James Buchanan, although it almost came up in committee. Never happened to U.S. Grant. Never happened to Warren Harding, but shoulda.

It happened once to Andrew Johnson, who barely survived by one vote. It happened once to Bill Clinton, but the charges were so farcical he was never at any risk.

It almost happened to Richard Nixon, who was the most likely candidate to have actually lost the matter and would have been the first President removed via Impeachment, except that he resigned before a full vote in the House could send the matter to the Senate.

Most of those names are for men who went down in U.S. History - save for Clinton, who's generally packed in the middle of passable Presidents - as the Worst Presidents our nation have ever seen.

They are joined by one more, a man more divisive than inspiring, a man more con artist than competent, a man who was already making the Worst Of list during his own tenure by historians who didn't want to wait the customary 20 years before passing judgment.

Except that donald trump has now set a standard no other Worst President ever reached:

Getting impeached twice in a single term of office. 

To David A. Graham at The Atlantic (paywalled):

This afternoon, Donald Trump, the third president in American history to be impeached, became the first to be impeached twice. The House of Representatives voted 232–197 to impeach Trump for inciting the attempted coup on January 6 and for trying to overturn Joe Biden’s election as president. The matter now goes to the Senate, where a trial is unlikely before Biden’s January 20 inauguration. No president has ever been convicted and removed.

It takes effort to get impeached, and it must be doubly so to be double-impeached. And to think, trump's been the laziest least-working President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice! Oh hey, it's a trend) since Coolidge (and at least Coolidge had an excuse). Back to Graham:

No matter what happens now, Trump will leave the presidency by January 20. But the circumstances of his departure and his future in politics are up in the air, because we don’t yet know what will happen in the Senate. It is not clear where Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stands, nor how he might manage his caucus. It is not clear if GOP senators will break with Trump. It is not clear when a Senate trial will begin. It’s not clear who will defend Trump in a Senate trial or how the trial will run...

Yesterday evening, The New York Times reported that McConnell “has concluded that President Trump committed impeachable offenses and believes that Democrats’ move to impeach him will make it easier to purge Mr. Trump from the party.” Other outlets matched that reporting; Axios says McConnell is in fact leaning toward conviction. (His wife, former Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, resigned from the administration after the attempted coup.) In a letter to colleagues today, however, McConnell said he had not made a decision about how to vote.

Parsing these reports is difficult. Such stories don’t get out without McConnell and people around him wanting them out, for whatever reason. The powerful Republican leader is sending a message, but it isn’t clear what he’s signaling, or to whom. McConnell’s support for conviction would be essential to any effort to convict. While the past month has already shown the cracks in his normally rock-solid control, the 17 Republicans needed to convict will not break ranks without his go-ahead, but his support might encourage senators who have long disliked or even loathed Trump privately to turn on him publicly...

It is unlikely the Republican-led Senate - which will flip soon when the Democratic winners from Georgia take their seats - will risk party division by getting the two-thirds needed to convict and remove trump. Even if the Democrats hold a legitimate Senate trial if the process is delayed long enough for them to hold it, they'll need 17 Republican Senators to risk the wrath of trump's voting base.

However, the Republicans themselves are at a crisis point: The two major factions - divided between the Old School pro-business tax-cut deregulation types who don't want to break the nation, and the New Blood Anti-Government Rapture-seeking nihilists who want to watch the world burn - know that whatever happens to trump decides the near- AND long-term future of their own party.

The Senators are going to have to gamble on the possibility that if they impeach trump, they break his hold on the political reins of the Far Right fanbase, who might move on to the next demagogue who can promise them cruelty and pain upon their enemies that trump can no longer offer. But they risk the possibility that the rabid Far Righters are already too far gone, that they will still follow up on their attack of the Capitol and on Congress to continue their Anti-Government Crusade and unleash more violence across their homes as well as the liberals'.

The thing is: The Democrats tonight are more organized and outraged by trump's acts of sedition and lawlessness than the Republicans are trying to defend themselves or defend trump. The Republicans are finding a little too late they cannot defend both.

One week to go, before Biden gets sworn in.

One week to go, to see the Worst President Loser of the Popular Vote trump go down not only in the history books, but going down to the local precinct to get booked for his crimes against the United States.