Thousands of members of the Trump cult waited outside for hours in the summer heat of Phoenix on Saturday, before gaining entrance to a Turning Point USA event where their personal god and savior appeared as part of his 2021 revenge tour. It was a political rally, a gospel revival, a rock concert, a carnival and a family reunion all in one.

As a show of loyalty to the Trump death cult, most of the attendees refused to wear masks to protect themselves and others from the coronavirus pandemic and its new, even more contagious delta variant. The Trumpists even went so far as to heckle the news media with chants of "No masks!"

These are the people recently described in a recent Washington Post essay by Michael Bender, who has spent considerable time among Trump's most diehard followers:

They were mostly older White men and women who lived paycheck to paycheck with plenty of time on their hands — retired or close to it, estranged from their families or otherwise without children — and Trump had, in a surprising way, made their lives richer. ...
In Trump, they'd found someone whose endless thirst for a fight encouraged them to speak up for themselves, not just in politics but also in relationships and at work. His rallies turned arenas into modern-day tent revivals, where the preacher and the parishioners engaged in an adrenaline-fueled psychic cleansing brought on by chanting and cheering with 15,000 other like-minded loyalists.

Trump and his neofascist movement inspires such extreme loyalty that his followers are willing to kill or die for him. No one feels that way about Joe Biden and the Democrats.

During his speech in Phoenix, Trump played his familiar roles: bully, mob boss, preacher, public menace, demagogue in waiting and former president who expects to be returned to power by any means necessary. As Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly warned in the weeks after Trump's defeat last November, Trump has channeled the energy and grandiose false claims that propelled Adolf Hitler to power in Germany.

On Saturday night, Donald Trump captivated his audience with a truly Orwellian performance. The event was officially titled, "Rally to Protect Our Elections." But of course the 2020 presidential election only required "protection" from Trump and his allies — protection against voter suppression, widespread lies and subterfuge, an attempted coup against the certification of electoral votes and other attempts to undermine democracy and subvert the people's will.

Trump repeatedly claimed that his "patriotic" movement had been betrayed by the Democrats, President Biden, the news media, social media platforms and other assorted "enemies." He made masterful use of doublespeak, saying, "I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy — I am the one trying to save American democracy."

He even added a new wrinkle to the Big Lie narrative, claiming that votes were supposedly rigged, stolen and otherwise manipulated in Biden's favor — and the truth is to be found in "the routers," the sort of technical-sounding detail that is actually nonsense. Adding new details to a conspiracy theory is an effective way of keeping one's audience engaged, ensuring that the conspiratorial mind finds new channels to follow and new mysteries to be solved.

Trump ramped up his vague threats of political violence, mixing the unsettling and the absurd in vintage style:

• "Like it or not, we are becoming a communist country. That's what's happening, that's what's happening. We are beyond socialism."
• "The survival of our nation depends on holding these responsible. ... We have to hold those that are responsible for the 2020 presidential elections scam. It was a scam, greatest crime in history, and we have to hold these people accountable."
• "These people are crazy. Whatever happened to cows, remember they were going to get rid of all the cows? They stopped that, people didn't like that. Remember? You know why they were going to get rid of all the cows? People will be next."
• "The Biden administration's action is an outrageous insult to the American people and to our country. The United States of America is the most just and virtuous nation in the world in the history of the world. And I'll tell you, you're not going to have a country very much longer. You're not going to have a country."
• "Our country is being destroyed by people who have no right to destroy it. People that won an election illegally. People that should not have been elected. They lost in a landslide. Joe Biden and the radical Democrats are wrecking our nation. I don't even believe it's him. I honestly don't believe. I don't think Joe knows where the hell he is. I don't think it's him. Crime is surging. Inflation is soaring. The border is gone. We went from the strongest border ever to the weakest border ever. The border is non-existent. Illegal aliens are pouring in, in record numbers. Critical race theory is being forced into every facet of our society. Free speech is being crushed."

In all, Trump's Phoenix rally was a celebration of lies, white victimology, paranoia and threatened acts of "patriotic" revenge and political violence. Such threats or possibilities are a key attribute of fascism, which proposes scorched-earth tactics to destroy the old social order and create a new one in the image of the leader and the followers.

How did the public respond to Trump's Phoenix rally? The same public voices who have been sounding the red alert about Trump's neofascist movement and its escalating threat to democracy continued to do so. In most important ways, the events of Jan. 6 were just a trial run or harbinger for worse political violence in months and years ahead.

It seems conceivable that the 2022 midterms may be the last "free and fair" national elections in the United States — and given the Jim Crow Republicans' accelerating war on multiracial democracy, that prediction is generous.

Too many voices in the media continue to downplay the dangers to democracy represented by Donald Trump, his movement and the Republican Party. When voices in the mainstream media do speak out, they often lack credibility because they were so late to face the truth about the Trump movement. They may express alarm now, but it's not clear that has much if any impact on public consciousness.

The house has been on fire for several years and now the professional smart people and others with a prominent public platform are finally screaming for help. It is far too late for such belated sounds of alarm to have a real impact on the public's consciousness.

Liberal schadenfreude was in full bloom on social media, which saw a torrent of mockery directed at Trump and his followers, often describing them as ignorant rubes or losers. But laughter will not save America from Trumpism.

In a recent conversation with Salon, physician and psychoanalyst Dr. Justin Frank, author of "Trump on the Couch," described this kind of laughter in the face of Trumpism as "unhealthy humor" and "defensive in nature."

It's defending against anxiety and fear. Specifically, it is a defensive use of contempt. Through it, people can demean and insult Donald Trump, which in turn means they don't have to be afraid of him. One of the ways a person can express contempt is through laughter. Thus it is a denial of one's vulnerability, because contempt means the other person is harmless, therefore he or she cannot hurt you. In that way, Trump is made into a pathetic fool. "If I laugh, it's not going to hurt me."
Ultimately, defensive contempt is a way of dismissing Trump's dangerousness. However, that type of contempt toward Trump is really an attack on reality. It is also an attack on one's own perception because you have actually undermined your own ability to understand just how dangerous Donald Trump is.

Six years into the Age of Trump, the American people cannot claim ignorance of Trump and his movement. They have been warned repeatedly. They have witnessed the consequences. On Twitter, former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt offered these observations after Trump's Phoenix rally:

Ignoring Trump is not an option. Looking away is not an option. Trump is the 2024 presumptive nominee of the GOP. His insanity, conspiracy theories, rage, grievance and lying are dangerous. His words tonight teemed with menace and intimations of violence. Yet, he remains unchallenged except @Liz_Cheney and @RepKinzinger will defy him. He is in complete and total command of the Republican Party and he is waging war on the idea of American democracy. We are at the most dangerous moment in this nations history since the Civil War. Trump is unstable, unfit and addled yet he could be the 47th President. If that happens, we lose the country. We lose our democracy.

Famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein told CNN's "Reliable Sources" on Sunday that Trump exhibits "a kind of delusional madness — such as Gen. Milley was talking about — that's on a scale and a scope that we have never experienced in an American president in our history. I think we need to calmly step back and maybe look at Trump in a different context. He is our own American war criminal, of a kind we've never experienced before."

All Donald Trump has to do to command more political violence is to tell his followers the place, date and time. Can anyone doubt they would eagerly follow his orders? The rest of the American people would be shocked. The mainstream news media would tell readers and viewers that this was "unprecedented" and "unimaginable" and that no one could have imagined such a thing in America. Democratic leadership would bray on about "bipartisanship," "democratic institutions," "norms" and "rules." Such reactions are a choice, born of willful ignorance and learned helplessness — a choice that may well doom American democracy.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection is getting another Republican member.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Sunday that she had appointed Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., to the committee, making him the second Republican to formally join the effort.

"When duty calls, I will answer," Kinzinger wrote in a statement following the announcement. "Today, I was asked by the Speaker to serve on the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6th and I humbly accepted. I will work diligently to ensure we get to the truth and hold those responsible for the attack fully accountable."

Pelosi had said earlier Sunday morning during an appearance on ABC's This Week that her "plan" was to nominate Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., to the committee. "You could say that that's the direction that I would be going," she told ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos.

The addition of Kinzinger also comes after Pelosi rejected two of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's picks for the committee, Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Jim Banks, R-Ind., whose selection for the job she called "ridiculous." Both Jordan and Banks voted to overturn several states' election results following the riot on Jan. 6, and have sought to discredit the investigation by instead casting blame for the events of that day on Democrats, who they say were deliberately unprepared for the violent assault on the nation's Capitol.

"We have to ignore the antics of those who do not want to find the truth," Pelosi said Sunday on ABC.

As a result of Pelosi's rejection of those two members, McCarthy decided to pull the other three Republican representatives he had nominated, leaving Rep. Liz Cheney, R-WY, as the only remaining GOP member on the committee.

Both Kinzinger and Cheney voted to impeach former President Donald Trump following Jan. 6, and have not signed on to the GOP's repeated attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Last Tuesday, Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, soared into space in a rocket many observers compared to a penis. A week or so before that, Richard Branson also blasted himself to the edge of space in a "spaceplane" designed by his company, Virgin Galactic.

After his history-making feat, Jeff Bezos gave $100 million to CNN commentator Van Jones, and another $100 million to chef José Andrés, who has dedicated himself to providing free meals to frontline workers and others in need during the pandemic. They were asked by Bezos to use the money for charitable purposes. This beneficence was a type of "apology" for his grotesque act of hubris and ego: he and most others of his class have no sincere sense of social obligation.

In so many ways these billionaires and their space adventures, during a time of human misery and rising neofascism in America and the world, is like bad science fiction turned to life. It is as if Paul Verhoeven, Mike Judge and Roger Corman collaborated on a film and then found a way to replace reality as we once understood it with their elaborate simulation.

Bezos and Branson's antics are further evidence that America is a plutocratic pathocracy that is cannibalizing itself. In this new Gilded Age, millionaires and billionaires have enriched themselves through a political and economic system in which social parasitism and social Darwinism rule largely uncontested.

In this new world — that in many ways is an old world, with echoes of feudalism and debt peonage — neoliberalism means "socialism" for the rich and "free markets" for everyone else. Even worse, the poor, working classes and middle class directly subsidize the wealth and greed of the very rich, because the latter largely do not pay federal and state taxes.

With the billions of dollars Bezos and Branson collectively spent on their rocket rides to space, they could instead have chosen to provide vaccines for the poor around the world, rid the human race of a deadly disease, help uplift the poor and other vulnerable people worldwide, create a project to address the global climate emergency, or done other good works that would have simultaneously soothed their egos and desperate need for attention while also helping others.

With the money spent on his rocket ride and his gifts to Jones and Andrés, Bezos could have instead chosen to provide a true living wage for his employees (the very people who helped him to obtain his vast wealth) or given each of them a substantial cash bonus.

As seen with the Biden administration's new Child Tax Credit it does not take large sums of money to substantially improve the life chances of poor and working-class people in America. Bezos and Branson could easily choose to do the same.

In response to these billionaire space flights, Deepak Xavier, who heads Oxfam International's global inequality campaign, said this:

We've now reached stratospheric inequality. Billionaires burning into space, away from a world of pandemic, climate change and starvation. 11 people are likely now dying of hunger each minute while Bezos prepares for an 11-minute personal space flight. This is human folly, not human achievement.

The ultra-rich are being propped up by unfair tax systems and pitiful labor protections. US billionaires got around $1.8 trillion richer since the beginning of the pandemic and nine new billionaires were created by Big Pharma's monopoly on the COVID-19 vaccines. Bezos pays next to no US income tax but can spend $7.5 billion on his own aerospace adventure. Bezos' fortune has almost doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic. He could afford to pay for everyone on Earth to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and still be richer than he was when the pandemic began.
Billionaires should pay their fair share of taxes for our hospitals, schools, roads and social care, too. Governments must adopt a much stronger global minimum tax on multinational corporations and look at new revenues. A wealth tax, for example of just 3 percent, would generate $6 billion a year from Bezos' $200 billion fortune alone ― a sixth of what the US spends on foreign aid. A COVID-19 profits tax on Amazon would yield $11 billion, enough to vaccinate nearly 600 million people.

What we need is a fair tax system that allows more investment into ending hunger and poverty, into education and healthcare, and into saving the planet from the growing climate crisis ―rather than leaving it.

Bezos and Branson command such vast financial resources and power that they can engage in acts of global spectacle for their own ego gratification. Why are the super-wealthy flying off to space? For reasons of personal glory, or perhaps out of collective narcissism and greed, and perhaps to flee a ruined planet — or just because they can.

In the final analysis we may all share planet Earth, but the very rich live in their own reality. Michael Mechanic, a senior editor at Mother Jones, knows this well. His new book "Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live — and How Their Wealth Harms Us All" explores that private and exclusive world.

In this conversation, Mechanic explains what the wealthy and super-rich understand about money that other people do not. He shares how the lives of the wealthy and super-rich are indeed very much outside the lived experiences and reality of all other human beings. Mechanic also explains how the wealthy engage in sociopathic or antisocial behaviors, while suffering few consequences — other than their own rootlessness and unhappiness. He warns that no society with such extreme levels of wealth and income inequality is stable and that a healthy democracy needs a more balanced economy with a flourishing middle class.

This conversation has been edited, as usual, for length and clarity.

As the saying goes, there's a class war in America and the rich won. Why don't we see any mass resistance or pressure to change this unjust system?

This can partly be explained by an American ethos which emphasizes the myth of upward mobility. So many Americans actually believe, "We can be in the mansion someday, and when we get there, we don't want to be taxed too much." This pervasive wealth fantasy exists much more in America than in other countries. As compared to Europeans, for example, Americans are overly optimistic about the prospects for upward mobility. American politicians are constantly telling these rags-to-riches stories as well. Such stories ignore the structural realities of American society and the fact that upward mobility is more mythical than real. Family circumstances are the biggest predictor of a person's own economic circumstances, unfortunately.

What does the average American not understand about the very rich? What is their world like?

Here is one example. White men have much greater access to a network of people in the worlds of finance, venture capital and other lucrative industries that they can rely upon when they need a step up. If you have a friend who works in finance, you can use that relationship to get funding for your business. Even to get in the room with a venture capitalist you usually need to have a friend or other contact to arrange it. If you don't have access to that network, you are at an extreme disadvantage. Most women, in general, do not have such financial networks. Black people in America tend not to have access to those networks either. If you are a working-class Black person looking for funding for a company, good luck — whereas if you come from a wealthy white family, your dad likely knows somebody who can get you that access.

Wealth is intergenerational. There are many among the rich who actually believe that they "earned" their money through "hard work" as opposed to family money, luck and access to other resources. Donald Trump is one of the most notable examples: he received millions of dollars from his father yet brags about being a "self-made" man who got a "small loan" to start his business. Do the wealthy really believe such things?

It varies. Donald Trump is the least self-aware person on earth. He probably believes these myths about self-reliance and that he did it himself. I believe there are wealthy people who appreciate how lucky they are. When you come from a wealthy family it is easy to downplay all of the structural and institutional factors which helped you and your family and that hurt others in terms of accruing intergenerational wealth.

What is the average day like for one of the super-rich?

There are many different types of the super-rich. There are those people that don't work, who are just socialites and go around to events and so forth. There are people who are in industry and are workaholics. But either way, people tend to travel a great deal. They have massive social calendars and many things of that nature to plan. Super-rich families actually have something called a "family office." This is a private company that handles all their personal affairs and investments, and manages all the properties and household employees, and pays the bills. But mainly, the purpose of the family office is to make you richer and to protect your wealth. The family office also helps them to avoid taxes by whatever means necessary. These family offices just perpetuate a dynastic system.

What is it like to live a life without fears or worries about not having enough money?

Many of the super-rich still care about money a great deal, even though they have a ton of it. They don't need more of it, but they use money as a scorecard for their success. It becomes a big game, a competition when you can buy anything you want and have anything you want. That is a quite surreal experience. It is spending money on stupid things. It creates a mindset of "I don't care about money, I don't need it, I can just do what I want." I believe this hurts the children of the wealthy even more because it allows them to flounder through life, never having to stick with anything.

They just wander through life aimlessly. Many children of the wealthy end up getting into the family business or doing something else to maintain a lifestyle that they do not really care about – and that makes them unhappy. To me, that is a bad way to live.

Because they travel so much, the wealthy are often away from their kids for long periods of time. These very wealthy families outsource everything. There are people who do the cooking, the cleaning, the yard work, who take care of the children, etc. There are also consultants for everything. As one of my sources told me, "I meet these super-wealthy people and they don't do anything. They just sort of live in this bubble where everything's being done for them." I believe this explains why we see the super-wealthy engaging in crazy, high-risk, high-priced adventure activities.

There is much research which suggests that the rich, especially the super-rich and the plutocrats, are more likely to be sociopaths than the average person. Did you encounter any people who fit that profile?

Psychologists have studied these questions and have shown that wealthier people, on average, are less empathetic. They are more prone to antisocial behaviors. They are less socially oriented. On the other hand, there's no data that shows the same person before and after getting these large sums of money. Thus, the question: Is it more that these types of personalities are the ones that pursue wealth, or that wealth actually has these negative impacts on a person's behavior?

Does money change people? I asked that question of many people who are sources for the book. Some of them said, "If you have $50 million and you were a jerk, you're going to be a bigger jerk. And if you are a great person, you'll have opportunity to do greater." Essentially, it amplifies your personality. One thing we do know is that children of wealthy families are at high risk for drug addiction and low-level criminal behavior. The risk is similar for very poor kids. People who are from middle-income families are at much lower risk of such behavior.

What of the children of the very rich? Do they just learn that there are no rules for people like them? Poor and working-class people can't claim that they are sick with "affluenza" when they get drunk and run over people, for example.

I do believe that is the case. There is a sense of entitlement that the rules don't apply. We see this among those who are rich but not super-wealthy as well. It is just the idea, "Oh, I can just do this thing and who cares, right? I can cut in line, whatever." It manifests across a range of small behaviors.

What do we know about new money versus old money?

Professional athletes are a classic example. It's actually getting harder and harder for poor kids to make it into the NFL and the NBA. But there is still a pretty sizable number of people who make it in professional sports and come from financially challenging circumstances. They are extremely talented and have focused like a laser beam on being successful in their sport. Then, all of a sudden, they are getting paid $2 million a month. These are crazy amounts of money. I talked with a business manager whose clients are mostly MLB and NBA players. He told me about the following: "This one kid, he's making a million or two a month. He had to hire a housekeeper. Someone to go fold his clothes, do his laundry. Because this kid had never done his own laundry. He never folded his own clothes."

Many of these professional athletes do not know how to function in normal life. They have lived in a bubble. There are all these hangers-on and others in their orbit who are trying to get money from them. It can be the coaches from before they went pro, family members and others who are trying to get these young athletes to take care of them financially.

There are a lot of athletes who fall victim to that. And if you're a big superstar like a Pat Mahomes or Steph Curry, then you can afford to behave in such a way. But as my contact told me, "If you're a backup point guard for the Grizzlies, you can't support a bunch of family members for very long or you are going to go broke." It happens. They get in serious financial trouble. If you come into all those millions of dollars without any sophisticated knowledge about what to do with it, the whole thing can be really disconcerting.

Many people fantasize about wealth. But when you get that wealth, especially all of a sudden, it really changes your relationships with people – including old friends, your middle-class friends. You want to enjoy the money, and you may also want your friends to enjoy it too. "Can I invite my middle-class friends on this fancy trip where I'm going to pay for everything?" Sure, maybe you can do it once. But what's it going to be like if you keep treating your old friends to these super high-end things? It's going to get weird. Pride's going to get in the way, or maybe you'll feel like they are freeloaders. All that money can create very weird dynamics. Family tensions get involved. Children squabble about inheritances. It can become a total mess.

What are the informal rules about wealth that old money understands and new money does not?

Put that money away to make it last. Preserve it, and do not do what the young athletes do. You do not want to be flashy. Old money? it wants nobody to know it exists. The big wealth dynasties with their family offices generally do not want to be big public figures.

Some years ago, I was acquainted with a husband and wife who won the Lotto. It was a modest sum after taxes, perhaps only $150,000. Everyone knew about it because their names were in the newspaper. I asked them a few years later about what they spent the money on. The husband told me he wished they had never won the money, because all they did was pay off some bills and buy a new pickup truck. That was it. But everyone in their family, friends, the neighborhood, their co-workers, all thought they were rich. He told me it was so much stress with everyone asking him and his wife for money that they wished they had never won it to begin with. Is that a common experience?

Yes it is. The conventional wisdom about winning the lottery is that it ruins your life. And in some cases, it really does. I interviewed a guy who was a hedge fund manager. He had a house on Lake Tahoe right next to Larry Ellison's house. And the neighbor on the other side, it was this young guy in his 20s. It turned out, the guy had won a big lottery and bought this $4 million house on Lake Tahoe. He was always up there, just partying with his friends. He didn't seem to have anything else going on in his life. One day the rich guy pulls up in his driveway and he sees the coroner's van next door. He goes over there and asks, "What happened?" They told him, "The person is deceased. This young guy killed himself."

When you have a lot of money there are issues with trusting other people. You do not know who's coming at you. There are going to be people trying to get you involved in business partnerships, pitching ideas to you or trying to become your friend. But you don't really know whether they're there for some other reason. This includes potential romantic partners.

There was a documentary a few years back about lottery winners, that showed how they got all this money and moved into a new neighborhood, and the people there did not accept them. The interviewer asked one of the Powerball winners, an older Black man who came from a working-class neighborhood, what it was like to have all this money. The man was miserable. He and his wife almost started crying. He told the interviewer, "Look around. All we have is a house full of stuff. I don't want to buy anything because I got everything. The neighbors here don't talk to us because they don't think we belong. We were poor in the projects but now we don't trust anyone. We don't have those friendships or family relationships anymore. All we got is a whole bunch of money and a house full of stuff." Then the interviewer asked the obvious follow-up and the man said, "You know what? I was happier when I was poor."

It's true. If you don't have something to give your life meaning, and if you think money is the meaning of life and you pursue that path, forget it. You are going to be miserable.

So what's the magic number in terms of income and happiness?

There is research that looked at millions of people and their self-reported happiness. Positive emotions peak at incomes over 65 grand. Your negative emotions are minimized at about 95 grand. And then there is what is known as "life satisfaction," which is a type of measure of how you view yourself relative to your peers. That maxes out at $105,000, a modest amount of money.

Once you get above the satiation point where a person knows that their needs are met, it is all just creature comforts and other bonuses in life. As you go past the satiation point, your life satisfaction starts to decrease in wealthy nations. We still do not know why that is. But one of the speculations is that in order to maintain this high-end lifestyle, a person has to work all the time and they lose their social connections. If you take a high-paying job and you're just on-call all the time and have too many responsibilities, there is less time to enjoy your life and your relationships. What good is it, right? You have a large bank account and no friends.

We know a great deal about the poor and the "underclass," but we know very little about the very rich. They are under-researched because as a rule they do not talk to outsiders. How did you get access to them?

It was a very laborious process. I had many rejections. In fact, the billionaires wouldn't talk to me at all. They'll talk to you about other things. But they are not going to talk to you regarding their feelings about wealth. But the wealthy also have lots of middlemen, the PR people and the like, who said no. I got a lot more rejections than I got acceptances, I would say. So I had to fill in the gaps by talking to people who are on the periphery of the billionaire class, people who work with them closely, in financial management, of course, but also in such varied roles as building safe rooms for hedge funders, for example. I spoke to a woman who works security for billionaires and trains their nannies in physical combat. I also spent time hanging out with luxury realtors and luxury car dealers and all manner of people who interact with these incredibly wealthy clients.

What do you want the American people to understand about the super-rich?

By and large they are not bad people. The point of writing "Jackpot" was not to disparage the wealthy, but to point out how flawed our system is in America that allows people to amass such wealth at the expense of others. The policies that enable such an outcome is driving us apart as a society. It's really tearing at the social fabric, because as the rungs of the economic ladder get wider and wider apart, we are losing empathy for the people on the other side. There is now a situation where we are a society of extreme winners versus extreme losers. A healthy society has a thriving middle class. That's what really lifts all boats.

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Virginia's crucial off-off-year election, was caught on video saying he has to keep his anti-abortion views quiet to avoid alienating independent voters. His super PAC, however, has showered cash on down-ballot Republicans with extreme anti-choice views.

Youngkin, a longtime executive at the private equity firm the Carlyle Group who has spent millions of his own money to fund his first foray into politics, has scrubbed his website of public statements declaring himself "unabashedly" pro-life and has even tried to distance himself from Donald Trump, in hopes of winning over a Virginia electorate that has steadily trended blue in recent years.

During the Republican primary campaign, Youngkind vowed to "protect the life of every Virginia child, born and unborn," but admitted more recently that he has gone quiet on the issue because it could cost him independent votes. That was revealed in an undercover video obtained by Lauren Windsor, host of the web show "The Undercurrent" and executive director of American Family Voices, a liberal advocacy group.

"I'm going to be really honest with you. The short answer is in this campaign, I can't," Youngkin said in the video, which was first obtained by The American Independent and MSNBC, when asked if he would defund Planned Parenthood and "take it to the abortionists."

"When I'm governor and I have a majority in the House we can start going on offense," he said. "But as a campaign topic, sadly, that in fact won't win my independent votes that I have to get."

In another video, Youngkin acknowledged that the Republican position is increasingly at odds with moderate voters.

"We're going after those middle 1 million voters who are, sadly, gonna decide this — have decided elections for the last 10 to 12 years in Virginia, and they've moved a bit away from us," he said. "We're going to get them. We just got back a whole bunch of data today, and we're winning this group. This is the group that we have to go get."

Jamie Lockhart, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, told Salon she was "shocked" that Youngkin "admitted that he's deceiving Virginians to get their votes, flip the legislature, and strip us of essential health care."

Days later, Youngkin again avoided any discussion of abortion at a campaign event aimed at women voters with former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, refusing to answer questions on the topic even as Planned Parenthood supporters protested outside the event.

"Youngkin's candid-camera moment will be fodder for the Democrats throughout the campaign," Mark J. Rozell, the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, told Salon. "It's not just that he admitted he supports an unpopular view in Virginia on abortion, but that he admitted that what he says to try to get elected is different from what he will do if elected. The issue becomes not only abortion rights, but trust. If he seeks to beguile voters on this issue, what about other ones? It was a classic rookie campaign mistake."

Youngkin's campaign denied that he is hiding his views.

"This deceptively recorded audio demonstrates that Glenn Youngkin tells everyone he meets the same thing: he is pro-life, supports exceptions for rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is in danger, supports funding for women's health care, and opposes Terry McAuliffe's extreme agenda of taxpayer funding for abortion, including late-term abortions even on the day a baby is due," campaign spokesman Matt Wolking said in a statement to Salon.

Anti-abortion advocates did not seem too worried after the Youngkin video was released, since he had assured evangelical voters that he would "oppose laws that allow women to seek abortions," according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

"He's not being squishy because we already have him on record saying this stuff," Don Blake, president of the Virginia Christian Alliance, told the Washington Post.

Democrats are likely to feature Youngkin's comment in countless campaign ads this fall.

"It reminded me of Romney's 47% comment," Ben Tribbett, a longtime Virginia Democratic consultant, said in an interview with Salon. "It's the kind of thing that's gonna haunt him all the way through the election, undercutting his ability to move to the middle and be a moderate, because he's basically announced that he's not going to be forthright with people. That is a really bad place for an undefined politician to be."

Virginia has not voted for a Republican in a statewide race in more than a decade and Democrats won full control of the state legislature in 2019. So it's easy to see why Youngkin would want to shy away from expressing increasingly unpopular positions. But his financial contributions would seem to speak for themselves.

Youngkin earlier this year launched the Virginia Wins PAC and made a seven-figure commitment to fund "Republican candidates for every level of government" to try to reverse the state's leftward shift. Many of those GOP candidates hold extreme anti-abortion views. The PAC's campaign finance disclosure shows that Youngkin was its only financial backer, making a $400,000 contribution in March.

"Glenn Youngkin and his extreme allies are threatening to drag Virginia backwards," Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for the Virginia Democratic Party, said in a statement to Salon. "With Republicans across the country fighting to overturn Roe v. Wade and a right-wing Supreme Court poised to do so, Virginia's next governor must be committed to protecting the right to choose."

Financial disclosures show that Youngkin's PAC has donated at least $33,500 to anti-choice down-ballot Republicans.

Virginia Wins has given $5,500 to support state House candidate Karen Greenhalgh, a former manager at a chain of so-called pregnancy crisis centers, which often trick women seeking abortions into going to "fake clinics" where they are dissuaded from the procedure, sometimes in misleading ways. Greenhalgh has called for a broad range of restrictions on health care facilities that provide abortions.

The PAC also donated $1,500 to Republican state House candidate Tim Anderson, a gun shop owner who has vowed to fight legislation that he says would allow for the "murder of a sustainable baby" and called for more Supreme Court justices like Amy Coney Barrett "to keep extreme ideas like abortions at any stage from becoming law." If elected, he has vowed to donate 100% of his government salary to pregnancy crisis centers.

Youngkin's PAC has steered $3,000 to back Tim Cox, who supports legislation "prohibiting abortion from [the] moment of conception," defunding Planned Parenthood and repealing a bill passed last year to allow coverage of abortion under the state's Obamacare exchange plans.

The PAC sent another $3,000 donation recipient to Carrie Coyner, who has criticized insurance coverage of abortion procedures and vowed to fight for a measure that "blocks the use of state money for abortion." Coyner, a first-term member of the House of Delegates, has consistently voted against rolling back abortion restrictions in the state.

The PAC has also doled out $5,500 to "pro-life" Republican Mike Cherry; $5,500 to Nick Clemente, who has pledged to defund Planned Parenthood; $3,000 to Maria Martin, who says she is running to "protect the unborn"; $3,000 to Sylvia Bryant, who pledged to defund Planned Parenthood; $3,000 to Roxann Robinson, who voted against lifting abortion restrictions; and $3,000 to Steve Pleickhardt, who supports defunding Planned Parenthood and banning abortions after 20 weeks.

"Youngkin says he wants to go 'on offense' and these Republican candidates his PAC is supporting, if elected, would be his teammates in passing extreme anti-abortion legislation," Lockhart said. "They not only would move to rebuild the recently repealed obstacle course of delays and restrictions to access abortion care, but they would seek to pass a radical abortion ban like the one in Texas, which banned abortion at six weeks, before many people even know they are pregnant."

Abortion could be front and center during the campaign's climax this fall, when the Supreme Court is also set to review Mississippi's bid to overturn Roe v. Wade.

"With the Supreme Court taking up a case that could overturn Roe v. Wade, reproductive rights are under threat like never before," Lockhart said, arguing that data suggests 79% of Virginians "support legal access to abortion and believe that the government should not prevent a woman from making her own health care decisions."

Youngkin's abortion slip-up highlights the larger difficulties the increasingly conservative Republican Party has in winning over voters in a state that has consistently moved to the left over the last decade. Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat who is now seeking a second term four years after his first one (Virginia prohibits incumbent governors from running for re-election), won his first election in 2013 by just 2.5 percentage points. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., defeated Republican Ed Gillespie in his 2014 race by less than a point.

But Virginia has seen a massive increase in Democratic voters in the affluent suburbs of Washington, D.C., and moved sharply away from Republicans after Trump's 2016 victory, electing Gov. Ralph Northam over Gillespie in 2017 by eight points, reelecting Warner by 12 points in 2020, and backing President Joe Biden by a 10-point margin. In 2019, Virginians also elected a Democratic majority in the General Assembly, giving the party full control of state government for the first time since 1994.

Trump "said he wanted to drain the swamp in Washington but what he did was drain Virginia Republicans," Bob Holsworth, a veteran Virginia political analyst, told Salon in an interview. "For the Democrats, Trump has been a godsend — and he's been a millstone around the necks of Virginia Republicans."

Given those political dynamics, it's not surprising that Trump has become a focal point in the race after anti-Trump sentiment cost Republicans the gubernatorial race in 2017 and especially "after Jan. 6," as Whit Ayres, a longtime Virginia Republican consultant, said in an interview with Salon.

Voter turnout "surged by over 500,000 votes" in the 2017 race and that increase was "largely minorities, millennials, college-educated suburban women in Northern Virginia," Ayres said. "So for Mr. Youngkin to have a shot, he has to do better than Gillespie did among the Northern Virginia suburbs."

Trump has thrown his full support behind Youngkin, giving him his "Complete and Total Endorsement" hours after Youngkin defeated six other Republicans, including one who had dubbed herself "Trump in heels." Youngkin said he was "honored" to have Trump's support but has seemingly tried to distance himself from the former president since then, even releasing an ad seeking to tie Terry McAuliffe to Trump by highlighting a $25,000 campaign donation he received from Trump in 2009.

But Youngkin's attempt to link his Democratic opponent to Trump, according to Rozell, "makes no sense at all."

"No one is going to believe that McAuliffe is aligned with Trump," Rozell said, "and Youngkin risks alienating the still-sizable Trump base in the GOP by distancing himself from the former president."

Trump appears to have gotten the message that Youngkin is trying to push him away, and earlier this month released another statement with a distinctly different tone, saying that Ed Gillespie — the defeated 2017 nominee — ran for governor without "'embracing' MAGA or the America First movement" and that as a result Trump's base "didn't come out for Gillespie."

That appears to be a warning to Youngkin, which as Holsworth observed, puts him in a political bind. "To win in the Northern Virginia suburbs, especially, he's going to have to find a way to distance himself from Trump," he said. "But if he does so too visibly, you can be certain Trump will respond."

It may be difficult for Youngkin to shed Trump's toxicity in the state. Youngkin refused to acknowledge Biden as the legitimate president during the Republican primary, and has since promoted an "Election Integrity Task Force" in an obvious nod to Trump's false claims of election fraud.

"Trump represents so much of why I'm running," Youngkin told voters during the primary as he pushed to enact voting restrictions.

"It's always a challenge to pivot from a primary campaign to a general election campaign," Ayres said, "particularly in a state that leans blue like Virginia."

As for McAuliffe, he has been more than happy to see Trump become involved in the race, even offering to pay for the former president to fly to Virginia to campaign for Youngkin. His campaign responded to Youngkin's ad by launching its first TV ad labeling the Republican a Trump "loyalist."

Threading a needle between Trump's base and the independent voters he needs to win over, Youngkin has had difficulty forming a legitimate campaign platform. He has repeatedly criticized Biden's COVID relief bill as "unnecessary," opposed a minimum wage increase to $15, and opposed paid family and medical leave. He has slammed the state's Medicaid expansion while calling for expanded gun rights.

But some of his hardline rhetoric has disappeared from his website, as the Washington Post reported, and he has focused increasingly on culture-war issues like "critical race theory" in education, which Ayres described as a "smart move," saying that education issues "play very well for Republican candidates in the suburban areas where they need to do far better than they've done in the past couple of elections."

Democrats have repeatedly highlighted that Youngkin does not even have an issues page on his campaign site and accused him of "hiding" after he became the first gubernatorial nominee in more than three decades to skip the Virginia Bar Association debate. His campaign objected to "PBS NewsHour" host Judy Woodruff as the moderator, supposedly because she once donated $250 to the Clinton Foundation's Haiti earthquake relief fund.

Tribbett said the Woodruff excuse was "absurd" and an attempt to "distract people from the narrative that he doesn't want to debate."

"Youngkin isn't quite ready for prime time. That's why he's not debating now," he said. "It's very clear that he doesn't feel like he's ready right now. He's not taking questions from journalists. This is stuff that he should have sorted out months ago when he was seeking the Republican nomination, because coming into a general election like this is just inexcusable from a campaign perspective. He spent millions and millions of dollars on that nomination contest and then came into the general — and three months in, he still can't put up an issues page on his website. I mean, it's just sort of sad."

Virginia Republican insiders have recently expressed "consternation" about whether Youngkin has surrounded himself with too many "Cruz and Trump people," wondering if he really has a "Virginia-based platform," Holsworth said.

In theory, Youngkin's personal wealth and lack of a political track record should make him well suited to pivot in the general election, but as Republican primary voters and candidates continue to move further right, it will be more difficult to tread back to the middle. Some early 2022 Republican primary races have already devolved into contests over which candidate can out-Trump the competition, something that will be difficult to walk back in a general election race — especially facing the threat of criticism from Trump himself if a Republican drifts too far from his agenda.

"The Virginia GOP believed that they found exactly the right candidate to appeal to the conservative base while appearing moderate enough to win over swing voters," Rozell said. "Youngkin himself to this point is having trouble trying to appeal to both groups of voters."

Tribbett agreed that Youngkin "did a lot of things right" in the primary by positioning himself as the best general election candidate, but said that narrative is now "falling flat."

"Anytime you take a position that's not exactly what the Trump position is, you're trying to thread a needle," he said. "I think he's just been paralyzed in fear of alienating his base, so he's not really attempted to thread the needle but also hasn't energized the base. I can't think of a worse place for a candidate to be: someone who's not energizing their own base and is afraid to reach out to moderates and independents."

As the Republican Party continues on its march toward fascism, it's easy to find yourself making political connections — even when you are trying your best not to think about politics.

Recently I was reading about astrophysics (understanding only an infinitesimal amount) and saw the Republican Party's implosion into Trumpism as akin to the formation of a black hole in space, where truth (instead of light) is unable to escape the event horizon.

I found myself in the same frame of mind while watching Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 classic "Strangers on a Train," about a couple of men falling into a conversation and making an unholy bargain, which one of them thinks is a macabre intellectual exercise not to be taken seriously.

Falling back into the dream of the film, I could not help but see the conniving, unhinged Bruno Antony (brilliantly played by Robert Walker) as a precursor of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson and their ilk, those who have managed to kill off the old Republican Party and who are hard at work to murder majority-rule democracy — both through voter suppression and by inciting actual violence. For me, Guy Haines (played by Farley Granger) represented Republicans I understood, at least to a degree: Nelson Rockefeller, George H.W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney. To me, those Republicans might have been willing to take advantage of others and perhaps stretch the law to avoid taxes or otherwise enrich themselves, but they would likely have ruminated over it and made sure to attend church service soon after banking the profits. In any case, they believed in the necessity of compromise, the work inherent in politics.

These are the so-called RINOs, or "Republicans in name only," a term which — now that I consider it — was always a form of gaslighting and projection. That term has been used to attack actual Republicans and make them seem like another group Trump voters could despise and blame for their failings and bad impulses — another "other." Newt Gingrich and his chortling crew sent the Republicans who understood that compromise was the way of politics (and who, it ought to be said, also took their oaths of office seriously) the way of the Oldsmobile. It was a Swift Boat operation done on their own people. We could all see they were Republicans, but we were told they were somehow not Republicans, or at least not real Republicans — they were RINOs. The fake Republicans pushed out the real ones.

And there it was: Gaslighting — the favored authoritarian manipulation of "don't believe what you see with your own eyes" — so named for the 1944 film "Gaslight" (directed by George Cukor with Hitchcockian flair), in which a criminal, played by Charles Boyer, purposively undermines the mental health of his wife (Ingrid Bergman, who won an Oscar for the role) by lying to her endlessly and saying that things she has seen with her own eyes are not true. You know, like Donald Trump has done to the public for years — indeed, for his entire adult life.

The overarching gaslighting that the modern Republican Party continues to perpetrate on the American public is that good old yarn about how lowering taxes for the wealthy and corporations will boost the economy — the so-called trickle-down theory, which George H.W. Bush memorably called "voodoo economics," before he was selected as Ronald Reagan's running mate, at least partly to shut him up. It always brings to mind something economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote:

The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man's oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

The actual Republicans — who we are told by the likes of Matt Gaetz are not the actual Republicans — must have thought back in the Tea Party days that the Gingrich plan, the treat-the-opposition-as-your-enemy, shut-down-the-government, win-at-all-costs faction, would be a temporary thing, something to be countenanced for a short time. They clearly felt the same way about the antics of Donald Trump. It was all just kind of an unsettling joke, as Guy Haines thought of Bruno's proposed bargain to trade murders.

In the film, Bruno crashes a party and nearly strangles a woman while re-enacting the murder he has committed, which might remind anyone old enough both of Gingrich's crashing the GOP with his "Contract With America" (often referred to then as "Contract on America") and of the equally oddly named Grover Norquist, co-author of the "Contract," who often said he wanted a government small enough that he could drown it in the bathtub. (That phrasing seemed pretty personal — there's more than a hint of gruesome domestic violence in there.)

What Gingrich and Norquist brought to the party was the end of what used to be called "political comity" — seeing beyond different political positions and working together professionally to reach compromise. You know — pretty much the substance of politics.

There is a scene, both funny and unsettling, in "Strangers on a Train" in which Bruno and his mother (the memorable Marion Lorne, in her film debut) have a chance to catch up, and we learn a good deal about how Bruno became the person he is now. She fusses about his health and his attitude, remarking to her son that at least he had given up on his crazy earlier plan:

Mother: Now, you haven't been doing anything foolish?
[Bruno shakes his head while nuzzling her hand.]
Mother: Well, I do hope you've forgotten all about that silly little plan of yours.
Bruno: Which one?
Mother: About, um, blowing up the White House.
Bruno: Oh, ma, I was only fooling. Besides, what would the president say?
Mother [laughing with relief]: Oh, you're a naughty boy, Bruno! Well, you can always make me laugh.

When the film was made, the politics of the day were focused on the Cold War and distrust of anyone who might be sympathetic to the "other side." Looking at the film today, who could doubt that Bruno, like far too many Republicans, might be a QAnon believer, as well as a delighted supporter of Trump's Big Lie about the election, shrugging off the lack of any evidence while pointing to Chinese and Russian conspiracy websites. (In the film, Bruno works assiduously to plant evidence to tie Granger to the murder that Bruno actually committed.) Bruno would have been delighted to help with the planning for the insurrection of Jan. 6 and would have cheered others on from a discreet distance. And he would just as cheerfully deny everything he'd done. You can never pin down a psychopath. As we all know now, it is not possible to hold the shameless to account. They just cry persecution.

The images of the fight on the merry-go-round — sent into overdrive by a policeman who shoots indiscriminately, killing the carny operating the ride — are unforgettable. Granger's character, like, say, Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, is trying desperately to hang on as Bruno kicks at his hands and the whole contraption seems about to break apart. It does, at least until a carnival employee crawls beneath the carousel to reach the controls, too late to save the ride and some of its passengers.

One story concerning the making of "Strangers on a Train," as told by Ben Mankiewicz on Turner Classic Movies, is that Hitchcock was haunted by his decision to allow the man to crawl under the frantically spinning merry-go-round. For years afterward, Hitchcock said, he got sweaty palms every time he thought about that day. If Donald Trump is directing this insurrectionist flick now in production from Mar-a-Lago Studios, he's more than happy to sacrifice anyone and everyone.

The old GOP is going the way of that merry-go-round, and even if someone were to try to get to the controls now (Who? The Lincoln Project? The Bulwark?) it seems too late to save anything worthy of a democratic republic. Conservatives who are not pro-white supremacy, pro-conspiracy, anti-science, and chock-full of grievances will need to create a new political party someday — and get themselves out of the carnival business, with its glaring lights, mesmerizing sounds and untrustworthy machinery.

As legendary quarterback Tom Brady celebrated the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' 2021 Super Bowl victory with President Joe Biden, Brady cracked some jokes at the expense of a guy widely perceived his friend — at least until now. Along with ridiculing one of Donald Trump's disparaging nicknames for Biden, Brady also mocked Trump's claims that he didn't really lose the 2020 election by quipping, "Not a lot of people think that we could have won. In fact, I think about 40% of the people still don't think we won."

It's not likely that Trump enjoyed being mocked as a sore loser by one of America's most famous sports winners. Brady, who had not visited the White House to celebrate a Super Bowl victory since 2005, may have very well put the final nail in his controversial relationship with Trump. He also reminded us of one of the most underrated speeches in American political history — the one delivered 10 years ago by Barack Obama at Trump's expense.

There were many moments in Obama's historic presidency that could be described as his "finest hour," but my personal favorite has always been Obama's roasting of Trump during the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner. Not just because Obama was funny (although he was), but because he wound up foreshadowing Trump's ensuing presidency with uncanny accuracy. The history surrounding that speech also imbues it with deeper meaning. And since Obama got in his digs at Trump while retaining his dignity and basic courtesy, his words come across not so much as insults but wry meditations about the sensibilities that could catapult the unlikeliest of all presidents into the White House.

Before Obama's speech, Trump had been working the media to promote the debunked conspiracy theory that America's first black president had not actually been born in the United States. Then a mere reality TV star, Trump was testing the waters for a 2012 presidential campaign and thought "birtherism" might be a winning issue. Not only did it none-too-subtly play on racist fears of a nonwhite president, it also sent the message that Obama was somehow disloyal to American interests.

This was the backdrop to April 30, 2011, when Obama and Trump wound up in the same room for a night of unflinching comedy. The other was that as Obama skewered Trump in front of the world, he was also secretly working on the raid that would achieve what Republicans President George W. Bush had not — killing al-Qaida leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Obama couldn't say that to the audience, of course, but he did throw his American bona fides in Trump's face. He opened the evening by displaying a copy of his birth certificate against a montage of hyper-America iconography, all as the Hulk Hogan theme song "Real American" played in the background. After that, he showed the opening scene from "The Lion King" while joking that it was his own birth video. (The most prominent conspiracy theory held that Obama had been born in Kenya, as his father unquestionably had been.) All of this took on the birther issue directly, deflating what Trump hoped might be his signature talking point for the 2012 election cycle.

But Obama didn't stop there. He moved on to ribbing other public figures at the event, but eventually returned to Trump with an even sharper wit. Pivoting with a joke about how Trump could work to discredit Mitt Romney, then the future 2012 Republican presidential nominee (and later, coincidentally, Trump's most high profile Republican critic), Obama landed a devastating blow by mocking the six-times-bankrupt businessman for embracing ludicrous conspiracy theories:

Now, I know that he's taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter — like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?

This section of the speech is the most prescient because it anticipated Trump's greatest shortcoming as president. Despite his numerous scandals and policy failures, Trump was reasonably well positioned to be re-elected in 2020 because he had inherited Obama's booming economy. His downfall, from a strategic standpoint, was in failing to listen to scientists about the COVID-19 pandemic and embracing pseudoscience instead. If he had heeded early warnings and embraced bold policies to help Americans get through this traumatic period, he could have saved many thousands of lives, done less damage to the economy intact and quite likely cruised to a second term. Instead he played down the pandemic, ignored basic science and even got sick himself. Americans suffered far more than they had to, turning his policy failure into an inevitable political one. And all that could have been avoided had he not been exactly the type of person Obama described in 2011 — a fool.

Obama's lampooning of Trump continued:

But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example — no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of "Celebrity Apprentice" — at the steakhouse, the men's cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn't blame Lil' Jon or Meat Loaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.

There's a lot to unpack in those sentences. It is easy enough to see that in Obama's sarcastic praise for Trump's "credentials and breadth of experience," he was referring to the fact that Trump had no political or military experience. (He became the only president elected without at least one of the two.) Historical context, however, reminds us that Obama was himself accused of being too inexperienced to serve as president when he ran in 2008, even though he had served as an Illinois state senator and then a U.S. senator for nearly a dozen years. It seems almost certain that this double standard — which would become only more conspicuous after Trump was elected in 2016 — wasn't on Obama's mind.

Then there is Obama's quip about Trump's main job at the time, hosting the reality show "The Celebrity Apprentice." Once again, there was obvious commentary on Trump being held to a different standard than Obama, who was dismissively compared to a celebrity throughout his political career even though Trump literally was a celebrity, with no visible professional or political qualifications. There is also deeper meaning in the way Obama singled out Trump's fetish for firing people. The man had built his brand around the TV catch phrase, "You're fired!" As president, Trump got in trouble for the circumstances around his firing of FBI Director James Comey and his willingness to turn on or terminate even the most loyal aides if they wouldn't break the law for him (Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Vice President Mike Pence and Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr come to mind).

After his fear of losing to Joe Biden turned to reality, Trump became the first president to lose an election and refuse to accept the result, assaulting George Washington's legacy in the process. Indeed, he had telegraphed his willingness to be a historic sore loser before that election, making clear that he would never accept being fired by the American people. No other president has reacted as badly to electoral disappointment, with the possible exception of James Buchanan, who allowed the Civil War to break out after the 1860 election didn't go his way — but he wasn't even on the ballot that year.

Obama wrapped up that section of his speech with the one lame joke in his repertoire against Trump (a visual gag about Trump's tacky architectural aesthetic that simply didn't land). He moved on, but the world of comedy fondly remembers his performance.

"Every time a politician cracks a few easy jokes they didn't even write, headline writers will rush to call them a 'comedian' which diminishes what we do," comedian Steve Hofstetter told Salon via Twitter. "That's like calling someone the president because they voted once. But Obama had something I've never seen from another president: He had timing. When most politicians deliver a joke, they seem surprised when it gets a laugh. But Obama was familiar with the material and he knew how to deliver it. While I'm sure he had writers, he executed as if he'd written the jokes himself."

It was a speech reporters would later claim left Trump fuming — but that seems to be a legend invented after the fact. If you watch the actual video of the event, you see that Trump went along with Obama's jokes cheerfully enough, even waving at the crowd. Whether or not he was just putting on a polite show, he didn't act like a man whose ego had been severely stung. His reactions are, dare I say, even a little humanizing: He appears for all the world like he's having a good time, smiling and enjoying himself like he did during a Comedy Central roast a few weeks earlier. Indeed, he later directed his anger not at Obama but at comedian Seth Meyers (whose barbs were much more pointed). Trump said he'd had a "great time" listening to Obama, was "honored" to be singled out by him and thought he had delivered his jokes well. Meyers, by contrast, he described as "too nasty, out of order."

This matters because it showed that if Obama drew blood, the target didn't realize he had been pricked. Obama had deftly struck a balance, drawing attention to the ways Trump is ridiculous while also remaining respectful. It wasn't until after the dust had settled that Trump began to feel aggrieved, eventually refusing as president to attend the annual correspondents' dinners.

Obama certainly made other negative remarks concerning Trump, but his 2011 monologue stands out because it feels like a prologue to the history we've been living since 2016. In that sense, it can be placed next to the "Economic Bill of Rights" section of Franklin Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union address or Jimmy Carter's 1979 "Crisis of Confidence" address as a prophetic work of oratory. It's also the only historically significant presidential speech that was primarily meant to be funny (and largely was).

Arguably, that's the one sense in which it was misguided. Ten years ago it was easy to laugh at Donald Trump. Now that his Big Lie about the 2020 election is fueling a fascist insurgency, it is a lot harder to find him funny.

A spike in violent crime in the Atlanta area may jeopardize one of the strongest investigations into former President Donald Trump's alleged misdeeds, as the local district attorney struggles to both probe the former commander-in-chief and tackle an "historic" backlog in cases that grows by the day.

Fulton County DA Fani Willis has for months dedicated significant resources to investigating Trump for his pressure campaign on Georgia officials to overturn the state's 2020 election results. She is reportedly focusing her attention in particular on Trump's interactions with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who at one point was asked to "find" enough votes to overturn the former president's loss in the state.

But just as that investigation heated up, a backlog of more workaday cases under Willis' jurisdiction has grown to more than 12,000, according to a report from Insider, citing public comments and interviews with former associates of Willis. Much of this backlog stems from rising violent crime and state-mandated court closures due to COVID-19.

Though some resources are incoming in the form of relief money, that cash comes with stringent restrictions — leaving the future of her investigation into the former president in limbo.

"The problem she has is that she's in an elected position and the residents are getting tired of the crime," Michael Moore, a U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia during Obama's presidency, told Insider. "So are you going to dump all your resources into this [Trump] case that may turn into nothing? Or are you going to do your job and represent the people who have voted you in?"

Earlier this month Willis asked the Fulton County Board of Supervisors for more than $7 million in new funding for her office, which could be used to hire additional staff and lessen the backlog in cases. Local reports suggest the board and its chairman, Rob Pitts, are willing to consider the additional funding.

It certainly doesn't help matters that the investigation into Trump is a completely unprecedented case for a county district attorney, an office that has significantly fewer resources than prosecutors at the state or federal level.

"The DA's office has never handled anything like this before in its history," Clint Rucker, a former Fulton County assistant district attorney, told Insider. "You're talking about investigating a former president of the United States for some kind of impropriety as it relates to election fraud. Nothing like that has ever come through the DA's office before."

Though she faces a difficult task, a number of Willis' current and former associates all say she is doing a commendable job with the case, and that they trust her to carry the investigation to its conclusion — whatever that may be.

"If anybody's qualified to take on an investigation of this magnitude, it's Fani," said Peter Odom, a former prosecutor who previously worked with Willis.