Opinion

"We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

These were the words of then-President Donald Trump as he addressed a large, hostile crowd in front of the White House on Jan. 6, 2021.

'Tis the night before his second impeachment trial, and all through the Senate, cowardly Republicans are still grasping for some way to let Donald Trump off the hook while not looking complicit in his attempt to violently overthrow the government by sending a fascist crowd to storm the Capitol. (Hint: It's impossible.) So Republicans are reaching for their most potent weapon in the battle to convince the D.C. cocktail party circuit that they're still respectable statesmen: the welcoming arms of Politico, the beltway media outlet always willing to lend a sympathetic ear to pathetic excuses and amplify the silliest of GOP spin in the name of neutrality.

"Where Democrats and Republicans agree on Trump," read a Monday morning headline at Politico. "Both parties want to be rid of him. They just differ on the means."

Long before the virus, many Americans were sinking under waves of despair. Without transformative policies, that despair, with the added fuel of the pandemic, may turn into a tsunami. The aftermath could leave communities under rubble for decades to come.

Just in the 21st century, Americans have been threatened by everything from foreign and domestic terrorism to an increasingly aggressive and militarized police. Unable to count on jobs, adequate safety nets, or health care, they have watched the affluent make a killing on Wall Street. They have been spoken down to by politicians and the media, sensing that unless they are rich, the political system will ignore their voices. As research has shown time and time again, they were right.

Ever since the storming of the Capitol on January 6th — incited by the then-president Donald Trump and taken up by extremist groups he emboldened on the right — we've seen the GOP and its enablers try to blame Democrats and the much-mythologized "radical left" for what happened. They've also continually attempted to blame Democrats for right-wing violence that may occur in the future.

It began with the lame, debunked and unsuccessful attempt by GOP Trump loyalists like Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida to blame "Antifa" for the attack on the Capitol, even while it was unfolding. Others, particularly at Fox News, at the same time were incongruously pushing the idea that America had it coming for Democrats supposedly mistreating Trump.

This week's Senate trial is unlikely to convict Donald Trump of inciting sedition against the United States. At least 17 Republican senators are needed for conviction, but only five have signaled they'll go along.

Why won't Republican senators convict him? After all, it's an open and shut case. As summarized in the brief submitted by House impeachment managers, Trump spent months before the election telling his followers that the only way he could lose was through "a dangerous, wide-ranging conspiracy against them that threatened America itself."

It was a big week for actor Sacha Baron Cohen, who received Golden Globe and SAG Award nods for both his role as Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev in Amazon's "Borat" sequel and his turn as Abbie Hoffman, the activist and comedian whom Cohen played in Netflix's "The Trial of the Chicago 7." Both movies also earned additional nominations in their category and for other cast members, with a total of 11 nods all together.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Everyone should take advantage of a quiet moment to imagine what might have occurred if the Jan. 6 insurrectionist mob had succeeded in its objectives. Then-Vice President Mike Pence could well have died in an act of political assassination. Not far from his corpse, several members of Congress might have also been murdered. It is likely that the right-wing traitors would have also taken other elected officials as hostages, demanding that the Senate resort to extralegal measures to install Donald Trump as dictator, and effectively destroy American democracy.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Anytime your lawyers walk out on the eve of the most important trial of your life, you should be in big trouble. Except, of course, if you're Donald John Trump and you're facing your second impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, where the majority of Republicans are either spineless sycophants or outright authoritarians who will never vote to convict you, no matter how compelling the evidence.

That's exactly where Trump finds himself as his latest trial is slated to begin on Feb. 9. Five members of Trump's impeachment legal team resigned a little more than a week before the trial, ostensibly over disputes about trial strategy. According to several news outlets, Trump pressured the lawyers to center his defense on the widely debunked claims of election fraud he persists in peddling. The attorneys wanted to concentrate on constitutional issues.

In her Thursday floor speech before the House voted to strip her of all her committee assignments, Republican Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said that since she started running for office, she never voiced support for any of the extremist conspiracy theories that she had previously touted on social media. However, that's a lie.

"I never said once during my entire campaign QAnon," Greene said in her Thursday speech. "I never once said any of the things that I am being accused of today during my campaign. I never said any of these things since I have been elected for Congress. These were words of the past."

Critics of now-former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs were quick to pile on the conservative personality late Friday night after he was abruptly fired by the network just one day after Fox was hit with a $2.7 billion lawsuit over election fraud claims.

Dobbs, a Donald Trump booster who pushed election fraud conspiracy rumors to the bitter end, was summarily dismissed on Friday with the network not giving any specific reasons beyond the desire to make changes. For many critics, that seemed surprising since his show is one of the top-rated programs on the business network.

His firing set off a landslide of taunting and jokes about "cancel culture" -- a popular conservative talking point -- as you can see below:

Years ago, when I was back in Washington for a couple of years, writing a series for public television, I lived for a while on Capitol Hill, a couple of blocks behind the Supreme Court. In the morning when I went to work, I would walk to a nearby Metro subway station, look at the Capitol dome and sometimes stare across the Potomac to Virginia.

During the Civil War, I'd think, the Confederacy was right there, just a mile or two away. So close, and yet they were never able to carry their flag onto Capitol Hill until this January 6, when rioters assailed the seat of government, some of them carrying the Stars and Bars, the banner of the Confederate States of America. Five were killed.

Senator Josh Hawley seems to be having a bit of trouble staying on message.

After weeks of whining incessantly about having been censored and canceled by the news media, Missouri's fist-pumping seditionist issued a syrupy Tweet thanking them for their attention to him:

Last night, nearly a dozen Republicans joined all the Democrats in the House to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Donald Trump protégé from Georgia, of her committee appointments, in particular her place on the powerful House Budget Committee. This was in response to her incendiary speech and fear-mongering before taking office. In effect, they neutralized her. If you don't have a seat at the table, especially the big government money table, you don't have much in the way of leverage or bargaining.

This article was originally published at The Editorial Board