While life in America has gone on over the past five days — football games are still being played, people are having cookouts, kids are going sledding — much of the country is still in a state of shock over what happened on January 6th in Washington D.C. As more and more of the video footage from that day becomes available, it's clear that what happened was far more violent and dangerous than we knew. The pictures we saw on television and social media as it was unfolding looked bad, but what has emerged since then shows that something feral, ugly and deadly was afoot in that crowd that day:

The police officer beaten in that video by a Trump-motivated mob was not Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died of wounds from a different incident. It was another officer from the Metropolitan Police Department. That comment by Radley Balko may sound arch, but it isn't. That is exactly what happened and it's clear that there were many in the crowd also prepared to commit violence against elected leaders, presumably in order to force the illegal installation of Donald Trump as president on Jan. 20. That is what they came for. It's what Donald Trump sent them there to do.

Some people on the right have tried to rationalize this by saying that violence that ensued after the George Floyd murder this summer sent the message that the best way to resolve political differences is through violence. This is beyond sophistry. Violent protests have been part of American history since the beginning, starting with the revolution itself. Violent civil unrest has happened in every decade since. The idea that liberals invented it last summer is completely absurd.

But that's not the point. There is a difference between protests, peaceful and otherwise, which people do all over the world, and an attempt to violently overturn an election. To do that by storming a joint session of Congress, with all the representatives present, as it ceremonially certified an election is beyond anything we've ever seen before in this country. In all the protests, riots and uprisings, no one ever took over the U.S. Capitol and marauded through it looking for leaders chanting "we're coming for you" and threatening to hang them. It was no protest, it was an attempted putsch, a violent overthrow of a democratic government on the basis of a Big Lie that the election was fraudulent.

Plenty of people saw it coming. Many of the ringleaders had planned the violence in plain sight and they were incited by the President of the United States and several of his henchmen. People had been pouring into DC for days, ready to rumble. The day before the riot, they held a rally in which The Big Lie was broadcast over and over:

Everyone knew the city was filling up with far right extremists yet for reasons that are still unexplained, the authorities were unprepared at best, complicit at worst. Perhaps they believed that this group of Real Americans from around the nation (and in the Congress) were just blowing smoke when they shared their little #1776 hashtags and plotted their "Stop the Steal" insurrection. But anyone who was paying attention knew that they were focused on the Capitol where the certification ceremony would take place. Why it was left so thinly guarded is still a mystery.

We still haven't had an official briefing from any law enforcement agency on the status of the investigations or analysis of what happened, which is unprecedented. We've had nothing from the Capitol Police, the city police, the FBI, the Department of Justice, no one. The worst violent attack on U.S. government property since the plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11 and there has been no communication from the federal government.

What we are left with are accounts from those who were reporting on the event both inside and outside the Capitol and from those who were inside, terrified that they were about to be taken hostage or worse. Perhaps the most heart-rending is this Buzzfeed account from some Black Capitol policemen who had to deal with the grotesque racism of these insurrectionists, (many of them flying "blue lives matter" flags) including being repeatedly called the n-word:

At the end of the night, after the crowds had been dispersed and Congress got back to the business of certifying president-elect Joe Biden's victory, the veteran officer was overwhelmed with emotion, and broke down in the Rotunda."I sat down with one of my buddies, another Black guy, and tears just started streaming down my face," he said. "I said, 'What the fuck, man? Is this America? What the fuck just happened? I'm so sick and tired of this shit.'"
Soon he was screaming, so that everyone in the Rotunda, including his white colleagues, could hear what he had just gone through."These are racist-ass terrorists," he yelled out.

One of the heroes to have emerged from this riot is this man:

Reading these stories from the Black officers and seeing the footage of that lone cop facing the angry mob and luring them away from the Senators who were still being evacuated made me think about the other story of last week, the one that would have been an earthquake of its own, in a good way, if this hideous violence hadn't happened. I'm speaking, of course, of the wonderful outcome in the two Senate races in Georgia. For the first time in American history, this Southern state voted for a Black man and a Jew for the U.S. Senate.

Considering its fraught racial history — including being the home of the Moore's Ford lynchings, which the New York Times noted "is considered by many to be the last mass lynching in American history," and the earlier lynching of Leo Frank, a famous case of anti-semitic violence — this was a singular moment that we didn't have time to savor and analyze. For all of its politically reactionary, racist violence and conspiracy-mongering, the country is progressing anyway. It usually does, much too slowly and backsliding often, but inexorably nonetheless. In the midst of all this horror, we shouldn't forget that.

I'm sure there will be hours of commentary and analysis of the Capitol Insurrection and rightly so. This Trump cult has gone further than any group of Americans since the civil war to assault our government institutions and the democratic process. The big question now is if anyone in power will face consequences for what they did, starting with Trump and going all the way down the line. If there is no price to be paid for this you can bet that there will be more political violence from this faction down the road. If there is one thing in the footage that is crystal clear it's that they've tasted blood --- and they liked it.

Donald Trump has two basic talents. The first is for self-promotion and the second is a strong, feral survival instinct. Those two things were really all it took for him to rise to become the most famous man in the world with the most important job on the planet. (That should tell you something about American culture but it's too depressing to contemplate.)

The talent for self-promotion has snowed everyone from sophisticated investment bankers, who kept loaning him money year after year despite repeated business failures, to small-town business owners who thought that he was a great real estate developer and later a great president just because he told them so. They all believed his lies.

The survival instinct is probably the more important characteristic because it spared him repercussions for failure after failure. It didn't hurt, of course, that for most of his life he had a rich father he could tap whenever things got rough. Nonetheless, for someone who isn't very smart, charming or interesting, Donald Trump has shown amazing resilience. His survival instinct got him to the White House and it sustained him through four years in a very difficult job for which he was uniquely unfit. Any one of the dozen scandals that have engulfed him since he started running for the presidency in 2015 would have finished off any other politician. But Trump survived all of them, just moving like a shark through the water from one self-induced crisis to another.

I had assumed that his survival instinct would kick in with this electoral defeat and he would see it for the opportunity it was. He could leave office whining that the election was stolen from him but use it as a springboard to make more money by promising a big rematch in 2024. He would leave office gracelessly, of course, because it would make better TV to stand on the White House steps making a Douglas MacArthur style "I shall return!" promise before flying off in Marine One for the last time. Who wouldn't tune in to that spectacle?

But something went wrong. His instinct failed him and he believed his own hype. Maybe it was the pomp and the power of the office overwhelming him or the addiction to his ecstatic crowds but, for the first time, he couldn't see how to turn his failure into a win and his personality fractured under the weight of his frustration. I don't know if he came to believe the absurd conspiracy theories he spun about the election or if they were just a frantic web of lies he wove to keep himself from coming apart. But his only two talents have let him down and it's led him to a moment of ignominy from which I don't think he'll be able to recover.

Trump's manic insistence that he could persuade, strongarm and coerce various Republican officials around the country to reverse the election results in his favor seemed to be based upon the idea that if he just wanted it enough it would happen. Perhaps that's how he's talked to himself all his life and good timing and fortunate circumstances made it so. But his luck has run out. The people he needed to buy his line of bullshit just didn't buy it this time.

By the time he was reduced to cajoling and threatening the Georgia secretary of state to "find" the votes he needed to win the state, he was so unglued he didn't seem to realize that it wouldn't make a difference even if he managed to persuade the man to do it. This week's last-ditch fantasy that Vice President Mike Pence and some of his congressional henchmen could magically hand Trump the second term and make everything alright finally took him to the dark place where he incited thousands of his delirious followers to a full-fledged violent insurrection.

To be clear, such events had been in the back of his mind already.

Trump posted that the "protest" scheduled for the day Congress was going to finally certify the election would be "wild." He expected them to be confrontational and he egged them on at the rally just before the vote was to take place. He'd been reassured that a substantial number of collaborators in Congress, led by his MAGA maniacs in the House and Josh Hawley, R-Mo, and Ted Cruz, R-Tx, in the Senate, might just pull off the miracle and he clearly believed that a big crowd of angry Trump supporters in the Capitol would help the cause.

He sent them there to start a riot during a joint session of Congress presided over by Pence and that is what they did. People everywhere watched in horror as pictures of this violent insurrection were beamed live all over the world.

Congress rightly decided to reconvene that night and finish the Constitutionally mandated job that had been interrupted by Trump's mob. You might have thought the level of terror they'd experienced, along with the global disapprobation, would have dissuaded the Republicans from following through on their plot to object to the vote based upon lies about voter fraud. But they inexplicably kept to their plan, apparently believing that appeasing Trump and his violent supporters was still their ticket to higher office.

Their survival instincts failed them too. None other than George Will said of Hawley and Cruz, "everything they say or do or advocate should be disregarded as patent attempts to distract attention from the lurid fact of what they have become. Each will wear a scarlet "S" as a seditionist." By late Thursday even the oleaginous Ted Cruz was backtracking as fast as he could while Hawley whined on Twitter about his book on Big Tech being canceled due to his actions.

The Democrats are demanding that Mike Pence evoke the 25th Amendment or they will make Trump the first president to be impeached twice. Members of Trump's cabinet and top staff are resigning and even the Wall St. Journal opinion page is demanding that Trump resign or be removed. Prosecutors are suggesting that Trump could be criminally liable for some of the violence that took place and talk of self-pardon and pardons of his family and inner circle are reportedly becoming more serious.

Whether Trump leaves before the inauguration is unknown, but his post-presidency is looking less like a shadow presidency and more like permanent exile. The Republican party is collapsing. The MAGA insurrectionists blame Republicans as much as Democrats for Trump's loss and the establishment is being forced by these events to repudiate their own base. It is likely that this schism is going to divide the GOP for some time to come.

Until now, Trump was the hands-down front-runner for the nomination if he wanted it in 2024. And even if he decided not to follow through he had years of lucrative grifting on the possibility. But he couldn't accept that he would have to admit he lost, even if he could say it wasn't legitimate. His narcissism finally defeated his survival instinct and it has brought him low. It's brought the country even lower.

The fictional "American Carnage" of Trump's inaugural address four years ago is now reality with hundreds of thousands of Americans dead, an economic catastrophe for millions more and a violent political faction so addled with lies and conspiracy theories that this week they attacked the US Capitol to intimidate lawmakers into reversing a free and fair election. The knowledge that Donald Trump may have destroyed himself in the process is hardly comforting. He's left America in shambles.

It may seem as if President Donald Trump has done nothing since losing to Joe Biden but watch TV and rage tweet about his stolen election fantasy, however, he's actually been quite busy.

He's reportedly considering a military coup or an executive order to seize the voting machines in swing states that Biden won. He spent a lot of energy pushing Attorney General Bill Barr to pursue some of his wild theories about the alleged election theft and pressed him to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Biden's son Hunter. He's also been engaged in purging the federal government of those he considers disloyal, particularly at the Pentagon, where he has spent the final few weeks of his presidency installing some of his closest collaborators for reasons that remain unclear.

So you can't say he is doing nothing — he's just not doing his job.

Last week, we were informed that there was a major cyber intrusion into both business and government by what the intelligence services and private security companies believe was the Russian government. By all accounts, it is an unprecedented case of cyber-espionage, however, Trump had nothing to say about this for days until this weekend when he downplayed the attack:

Needless to say, he has also been silent about the worst public health crisis America has faced in over a century as COVID-19 once again surges across the country, filling up hospitals and morgues at a frightening pace. According to the Washington Post, one of his closest advisers, speaking anonymously, said, "I think he's just done with covid I think he put it on a timetable and he's done with covid. . . . It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it." Trump is known for projecting his own dark thoughts onto others so I suppose it's not even ironic that he spent most of the fall campaign insisting that after November 4th, nobody would talk about COVID anymore. For instance, he told the Republican Convention that it was all fake news, that "they want to make our numbers look as bad as possible for the election." At one campaign rally on October 24th, he told his ecstatic crowd:

"That's all I hear about now. That's all I hear. Turn on television—'Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.' A plane goes down. 500 people dead, they don't talk about it. Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.' By the way, on November 4, you won't hear about it anymore,"

This Christmas week, our country is losing an American every 33 seconds to Covid, Covid, Covid. As the Washington Post's Philip Bump points out, "every time you listen to Bing Crosby's 'White Christmas,' about five people have died of the virus between the beginning and the end of the song." The death toll is over 318,000 and climbing.

Oddly enough, Trump can't even tear himself away from his scheming about the election he indisputably lost six weeks ago to take a victory lap for the successful approvals of the vaccines. All he could bring himself to do was whine pitifully to the press that they'd better not give Biden credit because it was all his doing. He has barely mentioned the successful rollouts of the first two vaccines on his hysterical Twitter feed.

This is in keeping with his attitude about the crisis from the beginning.

You may recall that both the Washington Post and the New York Times have done deep reporting on the administration's crisis response from the emergence of the virus in January to their desperate attempt to re-open the economy in the spring to this summer's surprise surge. They are all excellent, long-form "tick-tock" pieces of how this emergency unfolded and unraveled. It was very bad in the beginning and hasn't gotten any better since.

In the latest installment, a report from the Washington Post called "The inside story of how Trump's denial, mismanagement and magical thinking led to the pandemic's dark winter," reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, and Philip Rucker lay out a narrative that would be farcical if it weren't so very, very tragic: If Trump and his cohorts had made even the slightest effort to encourage mitigation strategies and public health guidelines instead of fighting them all the way, they could have saved tens of thousands of lives.

The vaccines are, as the Post puts it, a "triumph of scientific ingenuity and bureaucratic efficiency" but they don't make up for the fact that the president, whom they describe as being "perpetually in denial," has led a monumentally dysfunctional federal response that was the direct cause of proportionally more deaths in the U.S. than in other developed countries. It is an embarrassment that is laid directly at his feet:

The catastrophe began with Trump's initial refusal to take seriously the threat of a once-in-a-century pandemic. But, as officials detailed, it has been compounded over time by a host of damaging presidential traits — his skepticism of science, impatience with health restrictions, prioritization of personal politics over public safety, undisciplined communications, chaotic management style, indulgence of conspiracies, proclivity toward magical thinking, allowance of turf wars and flagrant disregard for the well-being of those around him.

He would not listen to the scientists because they didn't tell him what he wanted to hear. That is the story of his presidency, isn't it? It's got to be happy talk or Trump doesn't want to hear it.

But let's not forget all the Republicans who enabled this catastrophe. From the governors who refused to take the measures that might have spared lives to their accomplices in Congress who refused to save businesses from going under so they wouldn't feel compelled to open up prematurely. Instead, they all genuflected to the man who can't hear bad news without falling apart.

For instance, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fl., actually had the temerity to post a picture of him getting the vaccine before everyone else:

The argument for doing that is that we need important and famous people, regardless of their politics, to get vaccinated so that others will know it's safe. I have a sneaking suspicion that I could count the number of people who will be reassured by Marco Rubio getting the vaccine on one hand, however. But ok, perhaps this is what we must do. Still, how infuriating for him to have the gall to then post this:

The obtuseness on display by a man who has excused the grotesquely incompetent response to this crisis having the nerve to lecture people who tried to save lives and businesses with almost no support from the federal government is almost too much to bear.

This is on Trump, to be sure. But all of his Republican accomplices were right there with him. They couldn't bring themselves to do what was necessary to help the economy weather the crisis and instead decided that it was better to let businesses struggle and hundreds of thousands of Americans die over these past few months. Even though the Republicans finally agreed to a $900 billion relief package late Sunday evening, i's very late and far from being enough. According to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Republicans only came to the table after months of stalling to help the two GOP Senators in the Georgia runoff election. The carnage they've helped create is unforgivable.

I have been chronicling the atrocities of the Trump era almost daily for five years and I'm exhausted. I don't think I'm alone. One of Trump's most insidious talents is to dominate the spotlight to such an extent that you can't look away even if you want to. He's everywhere. There is just so much, more than we can fully absorb, so we just keep watching, waiting for the spectacle to end, paralyzed and psychically drained.

And now it's almost over.

Aside from some short appearances in the press room to declare himself the winner, a couple of desultory interviews with friendly cable news hosts, one low energy rally in Georgia and the extended, puerile whine of his Twitter account, Donald Trump has been blessedly out of sight for most of the past five weeks. There's been no chopper talk, no televised Cabinet meetings with sycophantic tributes to his greatness, no crude insults toward reporters, nothing.

If one didn't know better, one might assume that the president is ashamed because he lost the election and doesn't want to face the public. But that would be wrong. If there's one thing we know, it's that Donald Trump has no shame.

We don't know if Trump will fire more people, pardon himself and his family, start a war or simply continue to sit in the White House raging against his enemies and tweeting out lies about the election but the fact is that this long national acid trip is winding down at long last. Unfortunately, the hangover is going to be titanic. Unless the nation sobers up quickly and takes action, we may never recover.

The good news is that we are seeing signs of life in the U.S. Congress in this regard.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, gave notice this week that his committee intends to pursue the subpoena of former White House Counsel Don McGahn. You will recall that McGahn was not allowed to testify before Congress on the basis of a novel legal concept called "absolute immunity" which, if allowed to stand, would render congressional oversight practically impotent.

So while Democrats continue to pursue the subpoena as a means to push back against a legal principle that attempts to usurp their oversight powers, they will undoubtedly follow up on just what happened with all of that obstruction of justice Trump committed. They may not be able to sanction Trump for it, but they need to build the record — after all, this guy may try to bust his way back into power in four years.

Meanwhile, we have also learned that the Manhattan District Attorney and the New York Attorney General's cases are proceeding apace. These cases are beyond the scope of any federal pardon, as you know, so Trump may be seeing the inside of a courtroom whether he pardons himself or not.

But is any of that enough? It can't be, particularly when the New York Times and Politico reported earlier in the week something so shocking that it would be a crime not to investigate it.

Two political appointees at the CDC admitted that they had been instructed to slant pandemic advice according to guidance from people such as Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway. And it's now quite clear that the administration did adopt a herd immunity strategy to deal with the pandemic and lied about it. One incompetent adviser actually wrote "we want them infected" in an email.

We knew this, sort of. Trump had been quoted early in the pandemic wondering why we didn't just let it "wash over the country" which Dr. Fauci, the head of infectious diseases at the National Institute of Health, explained would result in a horrible death toll. Still, Trump clung to that notion and ended up hiring a radiologist he first saw on Fox News, Dr. Scott Atlas, who promoted the concept. These new reports show the extent to which this policy filtered through the government and negatively affected the response. It was a conscious decision. Now over 300,000 people are dead and counting, many of whom might be alive today if Donald Trump were not the president of the United States when a pandemic hit our shores.

The Atlantic's James Fallows took a look at the problem of accountability for what's happened and I think his ideas for how to deal with it make a lot of sense. He suggests that the Biden White House steer clear of most of that work except for the important job of trying to make the executive branch work properly again. Obviously, he should remain hands-off any criminal investigations that might come through the Department of Justice, his only obligation there would be to appoint someone with credibility and integrity to handle whatever cases may already be percolating. So that leaves the Democrats, who control the congressional committees in the House, to create a Good Cop—Bad Cop dynamic between Biden and Nadler which might just be effective if the Democrats stay strong and don't react to bad faith caterwauling from the Republicans.

Fallows also believes that Biden should appoint three commissions, which I think are vital and I really hope that someone in the administration is listening.

The first would be a commission to look at the pandemic response. This won't be the last time we face such a crisis and this one was so much worse than it should have been. The country needs to know how it happened and understand how to ensure it doesn't happen again.

The second commission Fallows recommends would look into the cases of family separation at the border, with an immediate task to find the children and then document meticulously exactly how such a program came to be implemented. As Fallows points out, this didn't happen by executive fiat. There was complicity at all levels and it has to be exposed and dealt with. This grotesque policy is right up there with the pandemic in terms of sheer cruelty.

And finally, Biden needs to appoint a commission to investigate the Trump administration's assault on democracy itself. He didn't invent it, of course, but he's taken it to a level that is in danger of permanently damaging our election system and people's faith in their democracy. And he's done so on the basis of crude lies and propaganda.

Biden doesn't have to be personally involved in any of this. He can stay above the fray and concentrate on doing the job he was hired to do. But these commissions would go a long way toward reassuring the majority of Americans who are still shell-shocked by what has happened in these four years that at least there will be a public airing and permanent record of what went wrong. Most people are hungry for the truth and while I doubt Trump's followers will want to hear it, we need the truth for the history books. At some point, their children or grandchildren may want to know what really happened.

Throughout this post-election period, the reaction from congressional Republicans has been entirely predictable. Mostly they've remained mum about the demented behavior of their president during the last month as he has continued his precipitous dive into a rabbit hole filled with conspiracy theories so delusional that it calls for medical intervention. A few have stepped up to say publicly that Trump has a "right" to pursue legal remedies in court, while privately assuring reporters that the president just needs to act out a little bit before he finally can emotionally accept what's happened to him.

His stalwart manservant, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., initially involved himself in Trump's attempts to strong-arm state officials into throwing out legitimate votes in order to help him win. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has evidently been poring over some alleged statistical analysis he found on a dodgy website, and has convinced himself there's something hinky about votes that were counted after midnight. And Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the man Trump once accused of stealing the Iowa caucuses back in 2016, now wants the Supreme Court to take up one of the president's absurd cases.

This isn't the first time a demagogue and conspiracy-monger has captured the Republican Party. CNN's Ron Brownstein has pointed out the unpleasant parallels between the way the GOP establishment kowtowed to Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the '40s and '50s and their servile acquiescence to Trump's malignant narcissism. In fact, this seems to be a permanent strain in American conservatism:

Whatever their private doubts about his claims, [Sen. Robert] Taft and other GOP leaders concluded that McCarthyism was a political winner for the party. ... Gallup polls showed that about three-fifths of Republican voters viewed McCarthy favorably well into early 1954.

In another parallel to Trump, congressional Republicans were deferential not only because they considered McCarthy an ally, but also because they recognized him as a potential threat. The journalist William S. White captured their skittish ambivalence when he wrote, "In McCarthy, embarrassed Republican leaders know they have got hold of a red-hot bazooka, useful in destroying the enemy but also quite likely to blister the hands of the forces that employ it. Their private fear is that a lethal rocket may at any moment blast out through the wrong end of the pipe."

Brownstein notes that this dynamic drove the party further and further into conspiracy theories being disseminated by the progressively unhinged McCarthy. It was years before his reign of terror was ended and one of the few Republicans who stood up against him, Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont, told the truth about what had happened: "The responsibility for this thing lies squarely on the heads of the Republicans who have been obsessed with the value of McCarthy to the party. We are reaping what they have sown."

I don't know what it is about the Republican Party that invites this sort of thing but it's disturbing, to say the least, that we have seen it reappear in the 21st century. I have to say that I'm even more disturbed by what we are seeing in the aftermath, which also closely resembles what happened during that dark time. The Republican establishment, which so eagerly enables dangerous demagogues, seems to emerge from these episodes without any sense of responsibility for what they've done, or even any memory of what happened.

Sure, McCarthy was consigned to history's dustbin, remembered as a malevolent drunk who railed against communism and was finally taken down by Joseph Welch, chief counsel for the U.S. Army, who famously demanded, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" But there is little mention of the cowardice and opportunism of the Republicans of that time who acted as McCarthy's accomplices. They carried on with their careers as if nothing had happened. (In fact, one of the great Republican red-baiters of the era, Richard Nixon, went on to become president.)

This brings me to today, when I watch with astonishment as Republicans who have actively collaborated with Donald Trump are partying like it's 2009, as if Donald Trump were still hosting "Celebrity Apprentice." Take, for example Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who had the unmitigated gall to go to the floor of the Senate and say this on Tuesday:

Your jaw has to drop at the utter absurdity of any Republican saying such a thing, particularly one who not only supported Trump with his opaque, byzantine business dealings around the world but voted for every one of Trump's corrupt Cabinet picks, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who was just revealed to have remained on the board of a Chinese company up until last year.

Even more outrageous is Cornyn's opposition to Joe Biden's choice to head the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, supposedly because of her insulting tweets:

Here's another member of the Republican establishment weighing in on that "bad judgment":

Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio is also clutching his pearls over Tanden's "partisanship":

"I think it's very important to have someone who can work with both sides of the aisle," said Portman, who held the budget post under President George W. Bush. "She has a very liberal public record and a very partisan series of comments she's made."

That's right, the people who routinely say they don't read the president's outrageous tweets are now pretending to care about online civility. Moreover, they are complaining about "partisanship" when they all voted to confirm Mick Mulvaney, the onetime Tea Party congressman and founder of the House Freedom Caucus, which was so "partisan" it chased both John Boehner and Paul Ryan out of the speaker's chair and forced regular government shutdowns. (Mulvaney himself told the Washington Post that Tanden has no chance of confirmation.)

We are seeing a return to the smarmy, sanctimonious, "adults in the room" pretense of Republicans who will wring their hands over Democrats' alleged incivility and partisanship — toward Donald Trump, the crudest, most insulting brute in American politics since Joseph McCarthy. Hypocrisy doesn't even come close to describing this. It is shamelessness on a level that is downright psychopathic.

I maintain that one reason the Republicans did as well as they did in down-ballot elections was an ongoing desire on the part of people on all sides of the political spectrum to say, "Oh that's just Donald Trump — he's nuts, but now he's gone." Plenty of people all over the country apparently believed that and split their tickets, voting for Biden for president and Republicans for other offices. If the two Georgia runoffs don't go the Democrats' way, then that party's inability or unwillingness to make clear to voters that the Republican Party was equally responsible for everything Trump did will end up being one of the biggest mistake they've ever made. Republicans are already "pivoting" to being the grownups who need to tame the unruly Democrats, as if none of this ever happened, and the Democrats are already on defense.