A new crop of books about Donald Trump and his final days in office is set to be published in the coming months. One such book, "The Divider: Trump in the White House," from veteran reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, was excerpted in The New Yorker on Monday morning, complete with a previously unpublished resignation letter from General Mark Milley, Trump's final secretary of defense.

After mostly refraining from publicly criticizing Trump, top Trump officials are now running to make their disagreements with him clear. In response, Trump now says the men who he once boasted were "my generals" are "very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system."

As the Executive Editor at Texas National Security Review, noted, the excerpt paints an image of a Trump White House that is "chilling."

Here are the 4 most explosive revelations from the excerpt into Trump's war with his generals.

As many probably imagined was uttered during his White House tenure, Donald Trump reportedly searched for ways to be more like Adolf Hitler.

1. "Why can't you be like the German generals?"

"You fucking generals, why can't you be like the German generals?" a frustrated Trump reportedly asked his chief of staff, John Kelly.

"Which generals?" Kelly asked.

"The German generals in World War II," Trump responded.

"You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?" Kelly reminded the president.

"No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him," Trump insisted.

After Trump demanded the military be sent in to clear the Black Lives Matters protesters, Trump's generals refused.

"You are all losers! You are all f***ing losers!" Trump lashed out, according to the book. "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?"

2. "Look, I don't want any wounded guys in the parade. This doesn't look good for me"

After returning from his trip to France in 2017, Trump raved about the Bastille Day parade in Paris and told Kelly, "You are going to be doing this next year."

As was reported at the time, Trump ordered his people to immediately get to work on planning the "biggest, grandest military parade ever for the Fourth of July." Trump had a very specific aesthetic in mind for his military parade.

"Look, I don't want any wounded guys in the parade," Trump made clear to Kelly about the members of the armed services selected to participate. "This doesn't look good for me."

"Those are the heroes,' Kelly told Trump. "In our society, there's only one group of people who are more heroic than they are — and they are buried over in Arlington."

Trump reportedly remained unmoved: "I don't want them. It doesn't look good for me."

3. Gen. Milley's unsent resignation letter

The New Yorker published a resignation letter from Gen. Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country's top military official, in its entirety. But Miley did not resign in the end.

In his letter, Milley told Trump, "You are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people — and we are trying to protect the American people."

"I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people," Milley wrote. "The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people."

He continued: "It's now obvious to me that you don't understand that world order. You don't understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that."

4. Mike Pompeo privately doubted Trump's Big Lie

Baker and Glasser detail what they call an "extraordinary arrangement" in the weeks after the election between Mike Pompeo, Trump's secretary of state, and General Milley. The two held daily morning phone calls with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in an attempt to keep Trump from going off the rails with his Big Lie.

"'The crazies have taken over,'" Mr. Pompeo told General Milley during a conversation after the election at General Milley's kitchen table, according to the authors.

After Senate Democrats managed a last-minute resuscitation of President Joe Biden's major domestic agenda, passing their long-awaited health care, tax and climate package on a party-line vote, Donald Trump once again lashed out at Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

As Biden has seen a rapid succession of legislative accomplishments in recent weeks, his predecessor has repeatedly seemed triggered to take out his frustration on McConnell.

"Mitch McConnell got played like a fiddle with the vote today by the Senate Democrats," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "First he gave them the fake Infrastructure Bill, then Guns, never used the Debt Ceiling for negotiating purposes (gave it away for NOTHING!), and now this," Trump said.

"Mitch doesn't have a clue – he is sooo bad for the Republican Party!"

Trump previously tore into the bipartisan gun reform package that passed through the Senate last month, even though he has previously supported provisions contained with the measure.

"The deal on "Gun Control" currently being structured and pushed in the Senate by the Radical Left Democrats, with the help of Mitch McConnell, RINO Senator John Cornyn of Texas, and others, will go down in history as the first step in the movement to TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY," Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time. "Republicans, be careful what you wish for!!!"

Fourteen Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to pass the first federal gun control legislation in decades. Dubbed the "Bipartisan Safer Communities Act," the recently signed law is set to improve mental health resources, restrict straw purchases, and improve incentives for states to enact red flag laws, which allow law enforcement to confiscate firearms from gun owners who present a danger to themselves or their communities.

McConnell praised the measure as the product of bipartisan negotiation, saying that the Democrats "came our way" in ironing out the details.

Though Trump has positioned himself in the past as a defender of the Second Amendment, he has also expressed the need for stronger gun control in the wake of various mass shootings. In 2018, after seventeen people were murdered in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkalnd, Florida, Trump threw his support behind expanded background checks for would-be gun owners.

And in 2019, following two mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas, Trump openly backed the enactment of red flag laws. "We must make sure that those judged to pose a grave risk to public safety do not have access to firearms and that, if they do, those firearms can be taken by rapid due process," he said at the time. "That is why I have called for red flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders."

Jon Skolnik contributed to this reporting.

NOW WATCH: Trump’s CPAC speech was littered with clues he intends to run in 2024

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's latest attempt to garner national attention and trigger the libs was always likely to blow up in his face. Now it's apparent that Abbott's effort to one-up fellow Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis went a bit too far — seemingly upsetting everyone from Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) to truckers to the Trump-supported agriculture commissioner in Texas.

Abbott "is taking actions to move migrants without adequately coordinating with the federal government and local border communities," said CBP chief Chris Magnus said this week, after the governor's pointless and sadistic decision to bus newly arrived migrants all the way from Texas to the front steps of Fox News' Washington, D.C., studio.

As Amanda Marcotte points out in today's edition of her Standing Room Only newsletter, the basic premise behind Abbott's political stunt was that ordinary people in the nation's capital and other "sanctuary" states or cities would be horrified by the idea of immigrants arriving where they live. In other words, it reflects a deep-seated belief that everyone is xenophobic deep down inside.

RELATED: Greg Abbott's new border stunt: sending undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities

Yet somehow Abbott managed to anger the Border Patrol twice in one week.

The CPB, along with the Texas Trucking Association, which recently endorsed Abbott for reelection, has also spoken out against Abbott's decision this week to introduce lengthy new inspections for commercial trucks crossing the border from Mexico. That too was a stunt, built around the claim that the Biden administration has an "open-border" policy and is permitting illegal drugs and human traffickers to flow into the country unrestricted.

The entirely predictable result was massive delays for trucks loaded with legitimate imports from Mexico, which is the source of much of the fresh produce Americans consume every day, along with numerous other products. "The current situation on the border simply cannot be sustained," the Texas trade group said in a statement, calling on an end to Abbott's blockade before the "economy endures further irreparable damage."

Which was pretty much the whole point of Abbott's stunt in the first place.

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As Sid Miller, the Trump-endorsed Texas agriculture commissioner, explained, Abbott's truck inspections " are stopping food from getting to grocery store shelves and, in many cases, causing food to rot in trucks." Some truckers arriving from Mexico told the El Paso Times they had experienced more than 10-hour waits thanks to Abbott's policy. Further east at larger border crossings, the wait has reportedly exceeded 24 hours.

It's not a stretch to argue Abbott is deliberately backing up the supply chain at crucial choke points so that inflation is made even worse ahead of the midterm elections — and he doesn't appear to care about the collateral damage to truckers, grocery workers, consumers or the overall economy.

Of course American truckers are a diverse group, but many cherish their reputations as mavericks and their long association with conservative politics. In 2020, Bloomberg News found that truckers were among the occupations most likely to donate to Donald Trump, which was not a huge surprise. Just last month, truckers were hailed by the likes of Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz as the working heroes of America, after groups of truckers led right-wing demonstrations both in the U.S. and (far more effectively) in Canada. The Texas Trucking Association's endorsement of Abbott, came only two months ago. Now, after spending the early months of 2022 egging on truckers' unruly political demonstrations, Republicans are suddenly silent about the damage Abbott's stunt is causing both individual truckers and their entire industry. Go figure.

There's a pattern at work here: Greg Abbott used to be a "mainstream" Republican, at least in comparative terms. But like so many other figures in his party, he's joined a race to the bottom — haunted by the shadow of Donald Trump's impending 2024 campaign — in which Republicans are willingly harming their own base.

For another example, consider Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who this week vetoed dozens of bills passed in bipartisan fashion — including a three-year statute of limitations on the collection of medical debt — purely as revenge on Democrats in the state legislature. Youngkin, who ran as an approximate moderate and kept his distance from Trump, is now recommending increased criminal penalties for marijuana possession after pledging during his campaign to not roll back marijuana legalization in the commonwealth. Meanwhile, his administration is fighting to keep secret the calls to a state hotline where people can snitch on teachers who teach "divisive subjects" in public schools.

Youngkin was elected last year almost entirely because 800,000 fewer people showed up to vote for Terry McAuliffe, his Democratic opponent, than had voted for Joe Biden a year earlier. In Florida, fewer than 33,000 votes gave Ron DeSantis the governorship, yet that hasn't stopped him from doing his utmost to write Democrats out of existence in the Sunshine State. Far from governing as the moderate bridge-builder such a narrow victory might portend, DeSantis has led Republicans in passing anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion and anti-free speech legislation. He has even wrested control of the redistricting process away from Republican state legislators to draw his own electoral maps.

RELATED: Trump 2.0: Ron DeSantis is the future of the Republican Party

There's nothing new here. This is the Republican playbook: Win at all costs and by any means necessary, and then govern as a radical — even if it means sacrificing your own base. Then rewrite the rules to make sure you can't lose.

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Recall that Republicans were caught cheating on every level this week, from Trump supporters in The Villages, an upscale retirement community in Florida, to a former Trump aide running for Congress in New Hampshire to Trump's former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who apparently registered to vote at a remote rural trailer home he had never even visited.

This week the Republican National Committee also announced that it plans to withdraw from presidential debates, after not even bothering to write or present an official party platform in 2020. That makes perfect sense, if we consider that the point of a debate is to persuade undecided or wavering voters that they should vote for you. That's got nothing to do with Republican political strategy, which hinges upon turning out the party faithful in ever-greater percentages, while suppressing the vote on the other side. It's absolutely not in their interests to subject candidates to a debate, where they're likely to be called out for grotesque lies and distortions. If you can't answer questions from the moderators, then the most logical choice is to not allow the moderators to ask the questions.

At this point, the big question concerning the 2024 Republican presidential primaries is whether they will happen at all, or whether the entire party will once again prostrate itself before the greatness of Donald Trump. It would be nice to believe that such a craven display would doom them to defeat, but that's hardly a sure thing.

12 gallons of milk was my last straw. CNN's widely mocked report may have broken me. It seemed like only minutes after the clip on a Texas family struggling with that impact of inflation went viral, it was blasted out by the House Republicans on Twitter:

The report suggests a 40% rise in milk prices over (presumably) the past year. Not only is that not true, but prices are down, in nominal terms from a high in 2007. To be fair, it's pretty clear some prices are going up. But so are wages. Overall household debts have fallen, as well. So I don't mock the family or their milk consumption. I mock CNN for holding up these outliers of cartoonish proportions as a typical, representative middle-class family. And I resent how infrequently they report on actually food-insecure families. CNN could have interviewed people going in and out of a Kroger about how they feel about the stimulus checks as they get their groceries. They could have stopped to talk to a clerk or bagger at the store. Instead, they pre-manufactured a shopping trip using a family whose situation wasn't at all representative.

CNN left out this critical information on the impact of the child tax credit and said nothing about progressive Democrats' fight to extend such benefits to help families. This is how the narratives that demand bad policies take hold — at the "raving lefty propaganda machines" the Republicans love to complain about.

In Virginia, for instance, days before Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governorship with a closing message to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, The New York Times credulously profiled a supposed "Hillary-Biden voter" who planned to support the GOP. It turns out the guy is a frequent donor to the Republican Party who has authored several articles for his local chapter.

The media's ongoing credulity is why a right-wing operative was able to weaponize bad faith and ignorance into a nonsensical bogeyman.

The outrage that propelled Youngkin to victory was based on a lie. While the Republican promised to dictate what is and isn't taught in Virginia schools, Youngkin didn't win because he ran on banning Toni Morrison. Rather, the biggest story that motivated Republican voters in Virginia involved a sexual assault that was first reported, and distorted, by Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire in a right-wing attack on gender-neutral bathrooms. The basic premise was later proved to be a lie, but by then everyone from Loudoun County to Los Angeles had seen the story as part of the right's push to create a trans panic.

It's hard for the mainstream media to admit Republicans are almost always lying, from the leader of the party to the man on the street. That's fine. But the GOP hasn't done a substantively good thing in 30 years. The press could at least reflect on why they are still salient in spite of that. Virginia Republicans rigged their primary, forcing the leading Trump-style contender to drop out. When pundits fail to mention the likelihood that, given the choice, Republican primary voters would have chosen the more overtly Trumpian candidate, undoubtedly leading to general election defeat, they allow Republicans to hide the GOP's growing anti-democratic streak.

The pandemic proved that the GOP is as close to a death cult as a major political party can get. Republicans are now fighting to pretend slavery had no long-lasting effects while simultaneously suppressing Black voters and fighting against the Justice in Policing act. Republicans are trying to gerrymander Ohio, where Trump got 53% of the vote, to hold 86% of the seats in the legislature. In Wisconsin, where Trump only got 49% of the vote, they are attempting to take 75% of the seats, and up to 78% of the seats in North Carolina, a state Trump won by less than 50% of the vote. In response, Democrats plan to carve out one more district to which they are proportionally entitled in Illinois. It's hardball now, baby!

Meanwhile, moderates are busy pointing fingers at the Democratic base.

"We don't have the numbers that FDR had or that Lyndon Baines Johnson had in order to get some major, major legislation done," West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin said on Thursday, echoing sentiments shared by conservative Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, who blasted Biden after Democrats lost the governorship: "Nobody elected him to be F.D.R." Curiously absent from their post-election comments was any mention on how centrists pushing President Joe Biden's agenda to the right in an ugly sausage-making battle is probably bad politics. (Watching Manchin drive his Maserati truck into a crowd of protesters demanding his support for four weeks of paid leave is certainly a sight to behold.)

One reason voters could be skeptical about Biden's Build Back Better bill while supporting specific policies contained in the package could be because moderate Democrats themselves publicly attack them while offering no compelling alternatives. Sure, there is political polarization at play, and the fact that asking people to pay for social spending usually results in some backlash, but a very undercounted factor is that so many people are in support of those programs and also think that certain people don't deserve them. Oftentimes that distinction is drawn on racial lines.

Democrats sent everyone checks this year, distributed miracle vaccines quickly to all who want them, and, in Virginia in particular, passed and signed into law legislation making Virginia the first southern state to legalize marijuana. Policy barely matters in elections. Everybody wants these things until Election Day, at which point many people decide that these things are evil communism from hell. Propaganda is tough to fight with nuance and facts, especially when it is legitimized by the mainstream media.

Despite the exhaustive reports on the complete radicalization of the Republican Party, often by their own reporters, the editorial pages at the nation's leading newspapers too often proclaim the real problem plaguing this country is what goes on at some college lecture or tech seminar, not the movement to supplant election officials across the country with loyalists to Donald Trump or ban books that dare to teach about the experiences of Black children. So the fact that the press is giddy to spread bad news about Democrats is no surprise. It remains no less infuriating, though, that the press remains generally uninterested in why exactly corporate Democrats who take in big bucks from industry would work so hard to quash legislation championed by their party's leader — legislation meant to make the cost of living (not just milk!) more affordable for more people.

The only path Democrats have for a counternarrative is to fully embrace class warfare and explicitly call out the messaging and narrative of racism at the root of the GOP–corporate media coalition. Instead of giving up on identity politics, they need to craft a winning identity: Be pro-worker. Fight for justice. Hold Trump accountable.

If there was ever a time to hit the panic button in the Biden era, Monday was that day.

Monday marked one week before so-called moderates in the House of Representatives attempt to force a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure package passed at the center of President Biden's Build Back Better agenda. With his approval ratings stalling due to the double hits of a lackluster response to the delta variant and continued vaccine hesitancy holding down economic recovery, along with a messy withdrawal from Afghanistan that included the fatal drone bombing of 10 civilians, mostly children, Biden is now facing threats of sabotage from the very people with whom he made a political bed for decades in D.C.

Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona were out on Monday with a pair of demands for their fellow Democrats facing a confluence of deadlines, both real and arbitrary. Manchin, the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who has reportedly sought to "remake President Biden's climate legislation in a way that tosses a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry," now says he would like to delay action on Biden's agenda until 2022. That's just ahead of the midterm elections, so we all know Manchin's suggestion is the fast lane to nowhere. Sinema, for her part, is throwing a last-minute wrench in negotiations to take up for Big Pharma in opposing Democrats' plans to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices directly.

Also on Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear oral arguments in the case against Missippi's abortion law in December, likely dismantling the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade by June. Just weeks before, the high court laid the groundwork for this when it upheld Texas' ban on abortions. At least one abortion provider in the state has already been sued.

Monday was also the day that Senate Democrats, rebuffed by the Senate Parliamentarian the day before, frantically introduced an attempt at a legislative workaround to the ruling that granting legal status to immigrants isn't budgetary, and thus can't be included in the filibuster-proof reconciliation bill. Never mind that in 2005, the Republican-controlled Senate used reconciliation to pass immigration reforms citing citizenship as a significant economic and budgetary issue, because Manchin and Sinema have decided that defending a relic of Senate rules is more important than defending Democrats' majorities in Congress — or even democracy for that matter. (Republicans even fired the Senate Parlimentarian in 2001 after he ruled against one of their tax cut proposals.)

Immigration matters, as the world saw on Monday with images of U.S. border patrol agents whipping their horse reigns as they corraled Haitian migrants back into the Rio Grande at the Texas border with Mexico, under a Democratic administration, too. Thanks to a cadre of radical right-wing justices pushed onto the federal bench by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell during Donald Trump's presidency, the Biden administration is forced to implement Trump's extraordinarily draconian Remain in Mexico policy which prohibits asylum seekers from entering the U.S. while awaiting review. Now the Biden administration has enlisted the Defense Department to help in one of the fastest, large-scale expulsions of refugees from the United States in decades.

So where is #TheResistance?

For the most part, moderate members of the Democratic caucus in Congress were not flooded at their home districts during the August recess, even as they very publicly threatened to hijack Biden's agenda. Activists like those with Rev. William Barber's People's Campaign have consistently applied pressure to Democrats like Manchin, but without the masses in the streets protesting the horrific images of Haitians hunted on horseback under the Biden administration with the same fervor present when protesting kids in cages under Trump, it's little surprise things stay the same.

"The policies that are being enacted now and the horrible treatment of these innocent people who have come to the border must stop immediately," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., calling the practice "xenophobic," said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. "We must allow asylum seekers to present their claims at our ports of entry and he afforded due process."

A march for citizenship on Tuesday in Washington D.C. aligns Schumer with House progressive and Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Democrats are not in disarray, in fact, they are more unified they have ever been; they're just being held hostage.

"I have been working hard on my portion of it," Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told reporters of the multi-trillion dollar reconciliation package. "If it's actually going to happen, we're doing pretty well. So but I, you know, I mean, go ask Manchin or Sinema."

The chaos we are currently watching in Washington, D.C. comes down to the personal interest of these two.

Manchin currently maintains ownership stakes in two coal companies that he founded, including one run by his son, Joe Manchin IV. The senior "Manchin has personally grossed more than $4.5 million from those firms," The Intercept reported. Former Manchin aides with fossil fuel industry clients are able to directly lobby the senator. The same pattern is present with Sinema's newfound opposition to Medicare drug price negotiations despite it's overwhelming popularity across the partisan divide. (Even Donald Trump talked big about lower prescription drug prices.)

In 2009 there were 60 Democratic Senators (briefly). Now, a dozen years later, it is an epic struggle to get the country to elect 50 Democratic senators, after a decade in which the GOP descended into open white fascism. This trendline looks ominous. The flaw in the "Vote Blue No Matter Who" electoral strategy is that what gerrymandered maps and politically polarized sorting leaves us with too often is razor-thin margins where the Who really does matter. Sure Republicans didn't repeal Obamcare when they had control of Congress under Trump, but they passed the main priorities for both of their bases: corporate tax cuts and stacking the federal bench with conservative judges.

The donors can't be the only people Democrats in Congress are afraid of. The time is now for #TheResistance to make its return back to the streets — before it's too late.

Republicans had a golden opportunity to finally kick Donald Trump to the curb after Jan. 6. Instead, the majority of elected Republicans, both in Congress and across the country, have stood by him. They've spent the last five months steamrolling over anyone who dares to speak out against him or in defense of democratic norms. Fealty to Trump has become the latest battle line in the ongoing GOP civil war. That's how we've ended up with Liz Cheney criticizing the Republican Party from the left.

"We can't whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump's big lie," the Wyoming Republican and the No. 3 House GOP leader, said Monday at the annual retreat for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "It is a threat to democracy. What he did on January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed."

One of just 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump in January, Cheney hasn't let up on her continued criticism of his campaign to undermine the last election. It's made her an apparent target of the leader of Republicans in the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. McCarthy said in a "Fox & Friends" interview on Tuesday that Cheney's colleagues in the House have "no concern about how she voted on impeachment," but fret about "her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message.

McCarthy was caught on a hot mic telling "Fox & Friends" co-host Steve Doocey that "I think she's got real problems."

"I've had it with her," McCarthy went on about Cheney. "You know, I've lost confidence."

As another House Republican, Rep. Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, better summed up the situation, "If a prerequisite for leading our conference is continuing to lie to our voters, then Liz is not the best fit." Cheney's betting on surviving this battle, even if she loses her leadership seat in the House, as Salon's Heather Digby Parton recently explained:

This week Cheney herself refused to rule out a 2024 presidential bid, and it's obvious her strategy is to run on her new reputation as the tough conservative woman who stood up to Donald Trump. It's not a bad plan. Cheney understands politics and realizes that her only hope for the presidency is to be the anti-Trump, in the hopes that his star fades or he decides not to run and she can emerge as the GOP standard-bearer who might be able to lure back some of those suburban women and college-educated white men who had been staunch Republicans until the Trump circus came to town.

The problem with this bet, however, is that there are no signs the GOP has any intention of abandoning Trump, or — more importantly — abandoning their anti-democratic tendencies.

Cheney's father rode into office with George W. Bush after losing the popular vote. The next Republican in the White House to follow, Trump, also lost the popular vote. Neither showed humility about it and the Republicans proudly marched forward relentlessly pursuing their agendas. Biden won the most votes in history and beat Trump by seven million votes despite Republican efforts to disenfranchise and confuse voters. Still, Republicans have the nerve to cry foul and complain. By contrast, we know for a fact that Trump was calling officials in Georgia (and likely every other red state) demanding that they "find" him more votes. We literally have Trump on tape trying to commit election fraud. Lot of good it did. He's still planning on running in 2024. And as of right now, nothing is stopping him.

Liz Cheney's latest comments came in an off-the-record interview with former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Ryan, you'll recall, now sits on the board of Fox News, where one executive told Vanity Fair in 2019, "Paul is embarrassed about Trump and now he has the power to do something about it."

Paul Ryan may have the power to do something about it, but unlike Cheney (who at least voted to impeach Trump) he hasn't. Instead, he's been cashing in at the right-wing network and watched as Tucker Carlson has risen to the top spot by spewing barely diluted white nationalism. Ryan wouldn't even say anything after Trump celebrated Mitt Romney, the man Ryan ran on a presidential ticket with a few short years back, being booed by his hometown crowd. The media-supported myth that Ryan was a serious, responsible lawmaker propped up this malevolent character for far too long.

This is the incentive problem in the so-called conservative movement that no one seems to want to grapple with. A similar, but not identical, incentive structure led the Washington Post to host Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley for a livestream on Tuesday, where the Republican defended raising his fist in solidarity with a mob that would eventually rush the Capitol armed with weapons and in search of his colleagues. He went on to complain that he was being canceled when a Post reporter merely attempted to correct the record about his continued mischaracterization of the election in Pennsylvania, a state that was specifically targeted with misinformation by the Trump campaign. It's why CNN's Chris Cuomo hosted Pennsylvania's former Republican senator, Rick Santorum, after the conservative pundit baselessly asserted that Native American culture is not American culture.

Trump told conservatives that "I am your voice" in his Republican National Convention speech in 2016. He wasn't wrong. Trump's brand of fascist politics is merely a symptom of American conservatism. Anyone in Republican leadership could have put their foot down and said something and even done something about anything the Trump administration did. Instead, they enabled it and now want the positive press.