TRIANGULATING THEMSELVES:

As Republican political strategist Sarah Longwell wrote in The Bulwark today, the Republican Party is facing an "extinction event," having been taken over by former president Trump to become the right-wing MAGA Party. As Longwell wrote, "In the Republican party as it is currently constituted, political power emanates completely and totally from Donald Trump." 

Longwell explains that Republicans have been stuck in a "Triangle of Doom," in which Republican base voters want their media to confirm their biases. Fringe media outlets confirming those biases gain traction. In order to reach voters, Republican politicians have to go on those fringe outlets, and that, in turn, normalizes fringe media. Over time, this triangle radicalized the party until 70% of Republicans now believe the lie that Democratic president Joe Biden didn't win the 2020 election. 

"Say goodnight," she writes. "The party's over." All but the MAGA Republicans have left. "The Good Republicans are gone," Longwell writes. "Probably for good."

Today, Fox Nation began a mock trial of Hunter Biden, with reality TV personality Judge Joe Brown saying that "something's way wrong here, way wrong," and suggesting that the legal investigations into Trump and the lack of them into the Bidens give the appearance that Trump and Biden "don't live in the same country." 

Hunter Biden is not in the government, of course, and is not under indictment; Trump and the Trump Organization are embroiled in a number of lawsuits that suggest the former president and his associates saw government service not as a way to improve American lives but as a way to make money. Ginning up a show trial for Hunter Biden seems an attempt to rile up the base and undercut the many legal issues in the news concerning the former president. But such a show trial is also a fundamental rejection of the rule of law, suggesting that the law is simply a political tool to use against enemies rather than a body of laws before which we are all treated equally.

There is a reason Trump supporters are trying to undermine the rule of law. In New York, Trump's wealthy friend and financial backer Thomas Barrack is on trial for selling his access to Trump to the leaders of the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investment money. The U.S. government says that Barrack fed confidential information to UAE leaders while permitting them to shape Trump's speeches and policies. In the first three years of Trump's term, Saudi Arabia and the UAE invested about $1.5 billion in Barrack's real estate company. 

In Northern Virginia the trial of Igor Danchenko for making false statements to the FBI, led by John Durham and other holdovers from the Trump Justice Department, suggests the Trump administration played fast and loose with national security in an attempt to undermine the Russia investigation. Witnesses in the trial have testified that the "highly unusual" decision by Trump attorney general Bill Barr to declassify an interview with Danchenko and share it with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) hurt national security. Graham promptly made a summary of the interview public to bolster the argument that the Russia investigation was "corrupt." But that release meant that internet hobbyists quickly figured out who Danchenko was, exposing a key FBI informant as well as his friends and family in Russia. 

This exposure for political reasons not only burned a key source, it weakened the ability of the U.S. to cultivate informants. 

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