Look at all the white men on the street
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Maybe he’ll shuffle off this mortal coil one way or another, but failing that the former guy is going to be the future guy when it comes to the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and the 2024 presidential election isn’t going to feature what could even in the very loosest sense be called “democracy.” The GOP has become the party of the institutionalized Trump revolution.
Former President Trump — in a taped interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News that was shared with Axios — defended, quite extensively, supporters who threatened to “hang” former Vice President Mike Pence.
Why it matters: Well, it is unprecedented for a former president to openly say it was OK to threaten the life of his vice president.Oh, the two men are on track to run against each other for the GOP nomination in 2024.
Zoom out: This is a slice of a 90-minute interview — conducted at Mar-a-Lago on March 18 — for Karl’s book, “Betrayal,” out on Tuesday.More news-breaking audio from the interview will air Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Go deeper: We will let the Q&A tell the story.
Jonathan Karl: “Were you worried about him during that siege? Were you worried about his safety?”
Trump: “No, I thought he was well-protected, and I had heard that he was in good shape. No. Because I had heard he was in very good shape. But, but, no, I think — “
Karl: “Because you heard those chants — that was terrible. I mean — “Trump: “He could have — well, the people were very angry.”
Karl: “They were saying ‘hang Mike Pence.'”
Trump: “Because it’s common sense, Jon. It’s common sense that you’re supposed to protect. How can you — if you know a vote is fraudulent, right? — how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress? How can you do that? And I’m telling you: 50/50, it’s right down the middle for the top constitutional scholars when I speak to them. Anybody I spoke to — almost all of them at least pretty much agree, and some very much agree with me — because he’s passing on a vote that he knows is fraudulent. How can you pass a vote that you know is fraudulent? Now, when I spoke to him, I really talked about all of the fraudulent things that happened during the election. I didn’t talk about the main point, which is the legislatures did not approve — five states. The legislatures did not approve all of those changes that made the difference between a very easy win for me in the states, or a loss that was very close, because the losses were all very close.
On a related note, I’m digging hard into the story of how John Eastman, the crank law professor who cooked up the bizarro world legal theory that was sold to Trump to justify the coup attempt, was hired as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Conservative Thought at the University of Colorado, which was his official position in the middle of all this insanity. It’s a classic story of how pernicious right wing nonsense of the most extreme kind is laundered through our universities, in order to appease the “conservatives” (this now of course means crypto to open fascists) who control regental boards and the like in even many purple and blue states.
Things are bad. Do what you can to save what’s still left.