OK, back to Trump, treason etc

*  Axios is doing some longer form reporting on the post election White House - basically painting a picture of a "professional" team of advisers who knew he had lost and encouraged him to accept it, or at least to try some "sensible" legal challenges, but they lost out to the "mad" team:

On the day after the election, Nov. 4, top staff including Stepien, Clark, Miller, general counsel Matthew Morgan and Jared Kushner had gathered at Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. They believed this would be a serious search for a path to 270 electoral votes through credible legal challenges.

Then Giuliani, Sidney Powell and a swelling conspiracy crew marched into the room — literally.

These two groups — the professional staff and the Giuliani cabal — filled in around one long, rectangular table in a conference room walled in by frosted glass. The pattern repeated itself the day after that and the day after that.

A bizarre routine set in. These meetings would begin with official staff raising plausible legal strategies. Then Giuliani and Powell, a lawyer with a history of floating “deep state” conspiracy theories, would take over, spewing wild allegations of a centralized plot by Democrats — and in Powell's view, international communists — to steal the election.

Bewildered campaign aides would look around the table at one another, silently asking what the hell was going on. One would invariably shuffle out of the room, followed by another a few minutes later. Then another. Then another. The professional staff would reconvene in Stepien's office, about 20 yards down the hall.

Eventually, Giuliani would realize that he and his crew were alone in the conference room. He'd walk down the hall and knock on the glass outside Stepien's office, where about eight aides had squeezed onto a pair of couches. "You guys, where did you go?" Giuliani would say. "This is serious!"

Asked to provide comment on this reporting, which was confirmed by two sources in the room, Powell said in an emailed statement to Axios: "Your story is materially false, but I'm sure the 'elitist and consultant class' that make millions of dollars lying to the American people are behind it and will push that propaganda." Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.

Officials including Clark, Morgan and Bossie, who played a key role in Trump's 2016 victory, spent many hours trying to stop the former New York mayor from running to the press or the president and muddling the campaign's legal approach. But they were outmatched, and Trump was tweeting his own spiraling conspiracies.

 ....

On Nov. 13, Clark was in the Cabinet room of the White House with Stepien, Miller and campaign aide Erin Perrine for a meeting on communications strategy when deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino summoned Clark into the Oval Office to settle a legal question.

Trump had Giuliani on speakerphone, and Giuliani, seemingly unaware of Clark’s arrival, was trashing the campaign staff's legal strategy in Georgia — and floating a debunked conspiracy theory about rigged Dominion voting machines.

"Hey, I've got Justin in here," Trump interrupted. "What do you think, Justin?" Clark laid out the legal process in Georgia and told the packed Oval Office that Georgia state law barred requesting a recount until after an election is certified.

"They're lying to you, sir!" Giuliani erupted.

"We're not lying," Clark shot back. "You're a fucking asshole, Rudy."

The following night — without notifying his campaign staff — Trump tweeted that he was putting Giuliani in charge of his legal challenges, along with pro-Trump lawyers Powell, Joseph diGenova, Victoria Toensing and Jenna Ellis.

 Trump has never had a clue as to who to take advice from.  If they can pander to his narcissism well enough, they'll be on the inside for a while, until things start to look bad, then they're out in a flash.

* An interesting article at Slate about the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, and what it may, or may not, indicated as lessons for today.

*  Polling shows the terrible problem of conspiracy belief (and Trump's personality cult) in the Republican Party:

The public mostly rejects the baseless conspiracy theory behind the rioting -- that Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to become president: 65% say that he did legitimately win enough votes, but a sizable share (23%) -- and particularly among Republicans (58%) -- believe that conspiracy theory to be true and that there is solid evidence to support it. There is no evidence that the election was illegitimate, nor that there was widespread fraud in the vote count.

 The Washington Post reported very similar figures:

• By 66 percent to 30 percent, Americans overall say Trump acted irresponsibly in his statements and actions since the election. But Republicans say Trump acted responsibly by 66 percent to 29 percent.
• By 62 percent to 31 percent, Americans say there’s no solid evidence of the claims of voter fraud that Trump cited to refuse to accept Joe Biden’s victory. But Republicans say there is solid evidence of fraud by 65 percent to 25 percent.
• 57 percent of Americans say Trump bears a great deal or good amount of responsibility for the assault on the Capitol. But 56 percent of Republicans say Trump bears no responsibility at all, and another 22 percent say he bears just some, totaling 78 percent who largely exonerate him.
• 52 percent of Americans say Republican leaders went too far in supporting Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. But 51 percent of Republicans say GOP leaders didn’t go far enough, while 27 percent say they got it right, a total of 78 percent who are fully on board or wanted more. Only 16 percent of Republicans say they went too far.
  

 I predict some sort of formal denouncing of Trump will need to be made by the establishment GOP to try and get his dumb base back into the fold.