Trump's cadre of "dereliction of duty" enablers

Maybe they thought they were playing a game. Just tweaking the libs. Or raising their ratings by inflaming the suckers who trust them. And then things got all too real. 

 

The despairing texts to the White House from these Fox News personalities during the insurrection, revealed by the January 6 investigation, tell a story. Greg Sargent explains: 

If you’re going to cast doubt on our elections as an organizing and galvanizing tool, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when people decide they must act on those lies.

... But to these Fox hosts, graphic depictions of that true intent — embodied in the rioters’ feral hunt for lawmakers to violently disrupt the election’s official conclusion — are just a bit too revelatory.

... Lying about our elections isn’t tantamount to endorsing violence in response. But telling people they’re being tyrannized by an all-powerful, multi-tentacled leftist enemy that wields our democratic processes as illegitimate instruments of subjugation can lead quickly to the thought that the only recourse is to take matters into one’s own hands, outside those processes.

 The Washington Post's Aaron Blake shares some of their pleas.

Fox host Laura Ingraham to [White House Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows: “Hey Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”

I wish the Wapo had had the decency not to call the texts "juicy." That headline is soul curdling if you think elections matter. The investigation isn't a thrilling game of gotcha. We are living amid a life and death struggle over the continuation of a mostly honest, almost majority-rule, democratic polity.

• • • 

While releasing some of the insurrection commission's findings yesterday, Liz Cheney described Donald Trump's actions that terrible day as "dereliction of duty," a crime in the military, though not perhaps in civilian life. After sifting through the growing evidence that Trump delighted in the mob violence he'd incited to overthrow the election, the Post's Phillip Bump concludes:

... The Jan. 6 committee is unmasking the effort. But then what?

• • •

Anne Applebaum's book about how previously conventional rightwing opportunists became active fascists is illuminating here. The enablers have made choice after choice to morph into the malevolent anti-democratic force they have become.