On hot air – Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker:

‘American politics remains trapped in the story of Trump, Trump, Trump. Biden, of course, is not irrelevant. Much of his bad polling can be attributed to the sour mood of Democrats and independents who have been cheering for him to do more. Maybe now they will rally around their leader. Maybe some of his recent accomplishments will matter when voters go to the polls in November. “Do I expect it to help?” Biden said, on Monday, when asked whether the burst of successes might help Democrats in November. “Yes, I do.” But, with the Republican Party still in thrall to its defeated former President, the achievements of Biden, no matter how considerable, are subordinate to the country’s larger crisis: the collapse of the Republican Party into a cult of personality. This has been reinforced, to the extent it needed reinforcing, by the week’s dramatic Trump happenings, which included an unprecedented F.B.I. search of Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, on Monday. Agents were apparently hunting for classified, possibly nuclear-weapons-related national-security documents that the ex-President improperly kept in his possession, according to reporting by the Washington Post. Also among these was the news that Trump, called to testify in a long-running New York State civil investigation of his business, on Wednesday, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid answering questions more than four hundred and forty times.
In any normal, functioning moment in the United States, these events would be taken as a clear and unmistakable sign of the grave legal threat to the former President from the various investigations into his conduct, which also include a separate Justice Department probe into the origins of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the ongoing House select-committee inquiry into January 6th, and a Georgia criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to pressure state officials there after his 2020 election loss. It’s hard to imagine any other ex-President with such legal exposure as the favored contender to lead his party back to power.’

(…)

‘Few seemed to doubt that Trump would soon announce his 2024 Presidential bid, and an immediate Morning Consult/Politico poll, released on Thursday, found that Republican primary voters were, in fact, four percentage points more supportive of Trump for 2024 after the Mar-a-Lago search than they were in the month before it. Only in the upside-down world of today’s Republican politics could this be a good thing for a politician, but we are where we are.
Watching Trumpists befoul themselves in condemning the F.B.I. raid—about which they knew almost nothing at all, except that it had occurred—was truly remarkable. Especially loud in the former President’s defense were some of those whose recent actions might have led Trump to suspect their devotion to him was less than absolute. John Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman who served as Trump’s director of National Intelligence, for example, was outed by another former Trump aide, Cassidy Hutchinson. In testimony to the House January 6th committee, Hutchinson claimed that Ratcliffe was against Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. This week, after the Mar-a-Lago search, Ratcliffe offered an especially overheated defense of Trump, which included a bold threat to abolish the F.B.I and get rid of its leader. The former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—who was also against Trump’s effort to overturn the election, as I reported in The New Yorker, on Monday—was supposed to testify on Tuesday to the January 6th committee, an inconvenience for a politician who has marketed himself as the ultimate Trump loyalist. So Pompeo started the day by tweeting his own florid defense of the boss. “If they will go after a former President,” he warned, “they will go after you.” The bizarre politics of the moment were best summed up in an exchangeThursday morning on “Fox & Friends,” when the co-host Steve Doocy—an anchor so well known for his Trump cheerleading that Trump once reportedly rated him a twelve out of ten on his personal loyalty scale—seemed astonished by how far Trump’s defenders were willing to go in attacking the F.B.I. on Trump’s behalf. What about death threats to F.B.I. agents, Doocy wondered, and over-the-top comments from House Republicans talking of the need to “destroy the F.B.I.” and “defund” it? “Whatever happened to the Republican Party backing the blue?” the Fox host asked Representative Steve Scalise, the House Republican Whip.’ Read the article here.

Trumpism is about destroying the state, its institutions, declare the state of emergency and start the well-known adventure of the totalitarian state.

There are people within the Republican party who are secretly working against Trumpism, but if history is any guidance, they will be eaten alive.

Yes, we are not Weimar yet but when the hatred for the state becomes more or less the same as the hatred for the elite, the internal enemies will weaken the state sooner and more effective than any foreign country.