Michaelangelo Signorile, The Signorile Report

It’s been less than two weeks since the election, but we can see Donald Trump and the GOP moving rapidly in their efforts to take sweeping authoritarian control of our government and give enormous power to the president.

Let’s be clear first, and just completely vaporize the media narrative: Trump didn’t get a mandate, much less a landslide.

He will, according to estimates, win the popular vote by 1.5% after all votes from California are counted. Kamala Harris will have won more of the popular vote than Hillary Clinton (who of course won the popular vote against Trump). Winning the seven battleground states Trump won by narrow margins—and with just 50% of the popular vote—doesn’t come close to President Obama’s 385 Electoral College vote win and 53% popular vote win....

In 2016, when Pennsylvania was called for Trump and he won the election in the early hours of the morning, I had tears in my eyes as I lay in bed and posted on social media that we would fight. It was a complete aberration, I remember thinking, a jarring anomaly.

Last night, as the returns were coming in, again stunning so many of us, I felt differently.

I didn’t see it as some fluke in the making, as in 2016. Then, Hillary Clinton was hounded by the exaggerated email story, which surfaced again, thanks to FBI Director James Comey, days before the election, only to be a nothingburger. Clinton had not campaigned in Wisconsin at all. There was deep Russian interference from early on in the election....

"2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!"

It had all the horrendous exterminationist language of the vermin speech — ”demolish,” “expel,” “cast out,” “throw off” and “rout”. And it is also a plea to his followers, many of whom are Christian nationalists and follow a plethora of end-time conspiracy theories, or both. It’s the “final battle,” he told them, an armageddon of sorts—wording that gets them completely engaged — and he needs them “at my side.”

But this is also defendant Trump’s final battle for his freedom, and he was admitting it and asking for help from his massive cult following. He’s been in and out of court many times now, and, in his increasingly addled mind, he’s been thoroughly humiliated by prosecutors and judges who’ve put him in his place. The process has made vividly clear to him the likely ramifications. According to Rolling Stone, Trump has even fretted with his lawyers about the possibility of prison, asking what it would be like....

The January 6th select committee has now told a federal judge in a bombshell filing that Donald Trump committed several crimes in trying to overturn the 2020 election and keep himself installed as president, engaging in a “criminal conspiracy” with others:

In a major release of its findings, filed in federal court late Wednesday, the committee suggested that its evidence supported findings that Trump himself violated multiple laws by attempting to prevent Congress from certifying his defeat.
“The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the committee wrote in a filing submitted in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California.

Meanwhile, just two nights ago Republicans stood up and applauded thunderously when President Biden, in the first 12 minutes of his State of the Union address, condemned Russia’s Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian who is now brutally invading the sovereign nation of Ukraine.

This article was originally published at The Signorile Report...

While Russia was invading Ukraine, prominent Republicans instead were condemning another “invasion” — which isn’t an invasion at all.

Promoting the white supremacist conspiracy of replacement theory, Donald Trump and other GOP politicians and leaders at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando discussed the “invasion” on the border with Mexico — and actually made comparisons between besieged immigrants seeking asylum and Putin’s armed troops storming Ukraine.

This article was originally published at The Signorile Report...