IMO, after decades of post LBJ Republicans appealing to old school Dixiecrats by linking social entitlements to immigrants and minorities as rationale for cuts to entitlements to offset tax cuts for wealthy campaign donors, Trump may have pushed it to such an extreme that Republicans can no longer even hint at immigration reform or social entitlement cuts.

Trump blew the chance to delineate his party from racists/extremists when he reacted to the woman in Fayetteville killed with his "Very fine people.." comment.

Defenders of the assault have no concept of reality or history. Both of which will eternally heavily condemn this insurrection. Really a shame for OUR Capital.

Busted.

Trump obviously got a lot of juice from having a bunch of thugs ready to move on his command...enough that he never wanted to really distance himself from them.....even though it was obvious they were pro-violence, motivated by racism and secessionist rhetoric, etc.....

Any sane President would have made really sure to avoid an association with a group like that.....might as well have been the Klan, fwiw. But Trump is such a power tripper. It appealed to him.....like having his own little brown shirt militia.

So he wound them up and turned them loose on the Senate....deliberately, after spending more than month lying and making shit up about the election....neglecting the business of the country while he met with any wingnut lawyer who had some crackpot theory on how to reverse the election.

I agree with people who say the burden of proof is too high for a court to prove something like conspiracy or incitement...but for an impeachment there really isn’t any burden of proof....just another popularity poll among Republican Senators....I guess we’ll see how cowardly the GOP is....

It looks like Trump is going to stay in the Republican party and try to primary whomever voted/votes to remove him. This is good news for Democrats in 2022. Expect more Senate seats to flip to Dems then and more house seats to go Democratic in 2022. Trump is going to be the gift that keeps on giving. Being a Republican is going to become more not less difficult.

The majority of Republican Senators have voted against impeachment.

The Republicans have spoken--and it's all fine.

My serious question--what are the rock-bottom, unchangeable principles of the Republican party?

Are there any left after Trump?

"When Trump called for the January 6 "wild" protest, the Proud Boys took that as a personal message from Trump to act."

"When Schumer declared Antifa was just an idea, the rioters took that as a green light for more mayhem."

Two comparable statements. The difference is the Republicans condemned the singular event. Democrats only justified their summer of mayhem.

As you can see, Biden's presidential campaign is still in gear.

Spazzo 2024 ?

yayayay Put it all to rest: What if all /every one of the protesters were black?

The new future for American Presidents--pull as much shit as you want during the last month in office. Load up a truck with gold from Ft. Knox. Sell pardons to the highest bidder. Sell some surplus military hardware. Get blackmail material from the NSA computers. Force that pretty gal to suck your ***. Trump's proven that the President cannot be held liable for acts comitted as a President and once you're out of office there are no consequences.

It took till this past week for my brother to finally admit the proud boys were a domestic terror organization. Until then he thought the real threat was Antifa. So maybe these videos and reporting serve a point even if it can seem futile

The Hyatt Hotels in D.C. were big beneficiaries of the right-wing rallies over the past 4 months there. No mask rule enforcement - customer-guests happy! Even Nicholas Fuentes stayed there! Illinois Governor J.B. Fatso happy, laughing all the way to the bank!

It will be interesting if the fbi can trace where all these guys were getting money.

What an interesting discussion. The world watched Trump spend his entire election campaign complaining that the "other side" was going to cheat and steal the election (no platform, no policies, no plan for the future, just lies). When he lost badly, he spent the entire post-election period doing everything in his power to overthrow the result (while tens of thousand died from the pandemic he ignored). When that didn't work, he incited an insurrection against the Government of his own country (resulting in the deaths of police and his supporters). And he will get away with it all, because his jurors will include his pals in the Republican Party. LOL

The best part, is that there are still morons defending Trump on this site. You can't fight stupid.

What a shit-hole country you have there. America, how far you have fallen.

.....We don’t have to guess what these fifteen men and women discussed on the eve of the insurrection, however, as the Omaha World Herald already reported on what Herbster and his compatriots were doing: “discuss[ing] how to pressure more members of Congress to object to the Electoral College results that made Joe Biden the winner.”

This seeming footnote in a mid-size newspaper may become one of the most startling revelations of the ongoing federal criminal investigation of the January 6 insurrection: it means that one of the organizers of the now-infamous Stop the Steal/March to Save America event met with Trump’s top advisers and family members—and possibly, if a speakerphone was employed, Trump himself—on the night before the insurrection to discuss how to “pressure more members of Congress to object to the Electoral College results that made Joe Biden the winner.” It also means that the organizer of the Jericho March, Flynn, which had been timed to coincide with the Stop the Steal/March to Save America, also met with this corps of Trump advisers to discuss how to “pressure more members of Congress.” And for reasons we still don’t know—but perhaps can guess at—the fifteen (minimum) participants at the meeting decided that they couldn’t meet in the White House. A call from the hotel to Alexander may offer an explanation for this.

Not only does this meeting appear to confirm that Trump’s team helped orchestrate the events of January 6, but that it participated in the calibration of those events to exert maximum “pressure” on members of Congress in the midst of them executing a grave constitutional duty. Moreover, it participated in that calibration in the presence of a member of the United States Senate, who was therefore—we can now conclude, from the reporting of the Omaha World Herald—working in private with the president’s team to advise Trump on how to generate that maximum pressure on his Senate peers....

At that meeting on January 5th, in person

Donald Trump Jr., eldest son of the president

Eric Trump, second-eldest son of the president

Michael Flynn, former National Security Advisor to the president

Peter Navarro, Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and National Defense Production Act Policy Coordinator

Corey Lewandowski, 2016 Trump campaign manager

David Bossie, 2016 Trump deputy campaign manager

Adam Piper, executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association

Tommy Tuberville, United States senator from the State of Alabama

According to research by political strategist and regular CNN, MSNBC, The Hill, CBS, and Fox News contributor Cheri Jacobus, Txtwire CEO Daniel Beck claims he was at the January 5 meeting also, and that additional attendees at the gathering included the following three people:

Rudy Giuliani, personal attorney to the President of the United States

Kimberly Guilfoyle, girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr.

Michael Lindell, Trump donor and MyPillow CEO

'''
Trump refuses to denounce white supremacists then tells the Proud Boys to "stand by".

When Trump called for the January 6 "wild" protest, the Proud Boys took that as a personal message from Trump to act.

'''

Saying "Sure" is an odd refusal.

I'm not plugged in to the Proud Boy network, so must defer to those who are. And did they said "wild" was a message to them to act? Or are we going with the word of someone whose knowledge of Proud Boys matches my own?

This is terrific stuff from the WSJ.

I wonder whether the FBI/etc have access to pictures, video, and GPS from most of the civilian phones and cameras there. If so, it will be interesting whether they can identify almost everyone there and their positions at any time.

Interesting contrast between these identified guys and the antifa crowd. The former seem like role-playing dress-up dudes. The latter, too, but dress in ninja outfits that cover the face, and (I'm guessing) don't carry phones/GPS/personal-tracking-devices. It's not hard to think of ways to defeat such efforts to hide identities. But still. Lotta work. I wonder if much of that work is already automated in the Capitol environs.

Trump did say he loves the poorly educated. This was your first clue that he loves the Proud Boys. These boys are so, so smart, that one of their first actions of their insurrection is to grab their cell phones and start incriminating themselves for easy pickings when the federal alphabet soup legal authorities begin their arrests. And to think these minds think they are smart enough to overturn a government who spends a trillion plus a year on military and intelligence with their toy AR-15s. It's comical! A drone strike will end it quickly and send them off to meet their maker.

The fact they are still on the grid and sending out a cell signal...

In their ultimate expression of stupidity, they really felt Trump loved them and would be there for them. They soon found out Trump is only about himself as these guys rot in jail. I have read since there were no pardons on January 20 at noon for any of these clowns, a few have figured out this tough lesson.

By the way, I mean no disrespect to the AR-15, but it's a toy compared to the modern weapons that could be used to eradicate Proud Boys if the crap ever hit the fan.

I’m not at all convinced that the rioters (including The Proud Boys) truly believe the implausible (even by many other conservatives’ standards) assertions of mass voter fraud uttered by a man who will, even as president, behave so childishly in public.

Long before election day, Donald Trump was saying he may not respect a Biden win, as though preparing his voter base for his inevitable refusal to leave office.

Post-election, just the loss itself is still touted as sufficient proof of the unverifiable claim Trump was cheated from a victory due to atypically massive electoral-ballot fraud.

It is possible the claim that Trump actually won the election is a pretext for their attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral win. Along with a sense of entitlement to another term of Trump, the rioters may have been enraged enough at his defeat by the supposedly ‘socialist’ Biden, they were now going to raise hell.

Or the Trump supporters may consciously or subconsciously believe that he has to remain in office for some perceived greater good (to save the nation or even to do God’s work), regardless of his election loss. Thus the ends justify the means.