One Foot on the Throne

It's weird observing this complete farce of a GOP primary process, where the front-runner doesn't bother to show up and the rest of the candidates don't have a plausible theory of why they should be the nominee aside from "maybe Trump will literally die" (and they can't even say that bit aloud). If we're at the unbelievable point point where it actually becomes acceptable in the GOP to say something like "President Trump was President for four years and never once took the job seriously, and also tried to spark the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War just as a long-shot bid to stay in power after losing the election," then we're at a point where the most likely nominee is some dark-horse candidate from the I Told You So Party. (Not likely in 2024. Odds are slim that Trump won't be the nominee of the Party of Trump, and that slim slice is mostly scenarios where Trump does literally die, with a thin sliver of "alive but in jail".)

Republicans have spent so much time covering for Trump's complete nonsense that they've become a bit delusional about Trump's mental acuity and slightly more (delusional in the opposite direction) than they would have been in some odd non-Trump-but-still-Biden counterfactual about Biden's. Trump apparently confusing Jeb(!) Bush with the one who got the US into the Iraq War just gets a kind of shrug. Any fears of Trump experiencing some sort of age-related mental decline just don't stand out when there's not that much to decline from, plus in an era of GOP governance-by-trolling it's all part of the bit. And I guess you can confuse a sort of generalized mania with sharpness.

(Still think it's entirely possible that the Republican Party will implode (still probably temporarily) post-2024 after a positively Reaganesque Biden landslide, but 2024 is going to be madness. And there's still the full range of possibilities, including another full dive into the Trump zone. Which is nuts.)

Senator Diane Fienstein died yesterday, and all I can say is I'm sorry she didn't get to enjoy a long retirement. The GOP will of course use the moment to extract whatever sliver of advantage they can from Dems momentarily losing their Senate majority. In that way, it's similar to the situation with RBG. It's worth noting that there's a difference between a failure to embrace realpolitikal concerns about timing your retirement in a way that doesn't completely screw over your political coalition, even though you're still up to the job, and a failure to leave your job before you're both no longer capable of doing the job and no longer capable of recognizing and responding rationally to the former.