Dick Polman, Pennsylvania Capital-Star

Trump – circling the drain, his power on the wane – justified his demand with a laundry list of allegations of how Biden had supposedly stolen the state via election fraud.

Are you really surprised by Joe Biden’s State of the Union performance? | Dick Polman

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The good news is many Republicans want to leave Donald Trump in the dust. The bad news is so many of them are just as odious.

Case in point: Mike Pompeo.

This choleric guy, who was plucked from back-bench House obscurity by the Trump team and inexplicably elevated to CIA director and Secretary of State, is clearly maneuvering to run for president in 2024. It’s obvious in two ways: He has sought to make himself more telegenic by losing massive amounts of weight and he’s seeking to romance the right-wing donor class and Duh Base by singing all of MAGA’s greatest hits. ...

When news broke the other day that President Joe Biden’s lawyers had found a documents with classified markings in a think-tank office he once used, and his home in Wilmington, Del., we all knew that MAGA’s false equivalence cops would spring into action.

Their predictable message, aimed primarily at low-information nitwits: Trump is innocent because he and Biden did the same thing!

Um, no. They didn’t do the same thing.

This is bad for Biden, purely from a bare-knuckle political perspective. The disclosure of the Biden documents (including a second batch that Biden’s people have now found on his Delaware property) has gifted the MAGA Republicans a propaganda weapon when they needed it most – as Trump potentially teeters on the cusp of indictment. ...

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This one is worth a stint in jail.

Trump’s sweat-soaked defenders are freaking out about a FBI photo of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago and fumbling for fresh rationalizations – they say it’s “staged” and “dishonest.”

Meanwhile, the thief-in-chief is veritably chewing his grandiose carpet about the way “his” top-secret documents were treated during the Aug. 8 search: “They (FBI agents) took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big ‘find’ for them. They dropped them, not me – Very deceiving.” ...

I’ve had some good yuks lately – starting with quack doc Mehlmet Oz screwing up his Man of the People Act in the “Wegner’s” supermarket, and lightweight Jared Kushner getting reviewed for his new book: “Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one…Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.”

But for sheer legs-in-the-air hilarity, I nominate this new Washington Post report:

“Donald Trump and close aides have spent the eight days since the FBI searched his Florida home rushing to assemble a team of respected defense lawyers. But the answer they keep hearing is ‘no.’… The former president’s current legal team includes a Florida insurance lawyer who’s never had a federal case, a past general counsel for a parking-garage company and a former host at far-right One America News.” ...