An official statement from Melania Trump on the tragic deaths that occurred in the halls of Congress after Donald Trump incited a mob to go after U.S. lawmakers blew up in the face of the White House because the first lady managed to make it all about herself.

While noting the deaths of Trump supporters -- and leaving Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick last -- the first lady also included a tone-deaf complaint by writing, "I find it shameful that surrounding these tragic events there has been salacious gossip, unwarranted personal attacks, and false misleading accusations on me – from people who are looking to be relevant and have an agenda."

That sentence alone caused critics to harshly criticize the president's wife for playing victim, with one commenter writing, "This is a trash statement from a trash first lady."

You can see a sampling below:

Responding to the efforts of what is expected to be at least 13 U.S. senators who are planning to throw up a roadblock to the certification of former Vice President Joe Biden's presidential win, the number two Republican in the Senate called it a waste of time.

Following reports that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) announced that he and 11 other U.S. want an emergency 10-day audit of the election results that showed Donald Trump lost before transferring power to Biden, Sen. John Thune (R-SC) said they were free to make the attempt but it is doomed to fail.

According to the Washington Post, Thune told reporters, "Now that we're locked into doing it, we'll give air to the objections and people can have their day in court and we'll hear everybody out and then we'll vote. In the end, I don't think it changes anything."

Thune's comments were echoed by a handful of other Republicans, with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) issuing a statement saying, "The egregious ploy to reject electors may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic. The congressional power to reject electors is reserved for the most extreme and unusual circumstances. These are far from it. More Americans participated in this election than ever before, and they made their choice. President Trump's lawyers made their case before scores of courts; in every instance, they failed. The Justice Department found no evidence of irregularity sufficient to overturn the election. The Presidential Voter Fraud Commission disbanded without finding such evidence."

You can read more here.

In his column for the Daily Beast, longtime political observer Michael Tomasky claims the country is watching "The Last (For the Time Being) Crack-Up of King Donald," while the president sulks at Mar-a-Lago over his election loss and plots to damage the Republican Party as he exits the presidency.

Although the president reportedly signed the COVID-19 aid bill at the last minute Sunday night -- while also forestalling a government shutdown -- the columnist said the president did great damage to the Republican Party by delaying the signing and infuriating the public by spending the weekend golfing after threatening a veto.

Calling the signing delay -- and the anxiety it caused over Christmas week -- "insane,' Tomasky suggested that the damage Trump is doing to the GOP is on purpose as both a loyalty test and to show Republican lawmakers that, even as he is leaving office after a humiliating defeat, he can still make them or break them.

"Trump is a 5-year-old, and everything with him is 5-year-old simple. Caveman simple," he wrote. "Thus, he can't think about the Republican Party, or the Senate under a Biden presidency, or anything of the sort."

Despite the fact that the president is scheduled to campaign for Georgia Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue before their runoff election against their Democratic challengers, Tomasky wrote that the president would really like to see Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) lose control of the Senate and suffer.

"He wants to screw Mitch McConnell. There's nothing complicated or tactical about this. McConnell acknowledged that Joe Biden won the election. Therefore he must suffer. Boom. Caveman simple," he wrote before adding that Trump would like to see both of the GOP Senate candidates to lose because he also lost the state.

"Trump doesn't care who runs the Senate if he's not president," Tomasky wrote. "To the extent that he's capable of a little strategery, he may well be thinking that he'd rather the Democrats have the run of the place in 2021 and 2022, and maybe even into the two years after that. They'll be easier to run against. Or so he thinks, because he assumes that if Democrats control Congress and the White House, America will have descended into socialist hell by 2024."

The columnist went on to note that the president is probably wrong about that, since the Biden administration will likely be measured on how it handles the COVID-19 crisis it inherited from Trump which inflicted so much damage on the country due to Trump's mismanagement.

You can read more here (subscription required).

According to a series of interviews conducted by Politico's Michael Kruse, associates and critics of Donald Trump have taken note that he is rarely seen in public since his re-election bid failed and he became a one-term president, with some worried his mental state may be in decline at the prospect of leaving the Oval Office.

Under a headline reading "Is Trump cracking under the weight of losing," Kruse wrote that the combination of silence from the president between rants on Twitter could be a sign that the president is having trouble coping.

According to Kruse, Trump's demeanor and recent actions are setting off alarms.

"It's not just his odd behavior—the testy, tiny desk session with the press, the stilted Medal of Freedom ceremony that ended with his awkward exit, the cut-short trip to the Army-Navy football game. It's even more pointedly his conspicuous and ongoing absences," the report states. "The narcissistic Trump has spent the last half a century—but especially the last half a decade—making himself and keeping himself the most paid-attention-to person on the planet. But in the month and a half since Election Day, Trump has been seen and heard relatively sparingly and sporadically. No-showing unexpectedly at a Christmas party, sticking to consistently sparse public schedules and speaking mainly through his increasingly manic Twitter feed, he's been fixated more than anything else on his baseless insistence that he won the election when he did not."

Speaking with Mary Trump -- the president's niece who is also a psychologist -- she said her uncle is in decline, telling Kruse, "He's never been in a situation in which he has lost in a way he can't escape from. Psychological disorders are like anything else. If they're unacknowledged and untreated over time, they get worse."

The president's former attorney and "fixer," Michael Cohen claims Trump's "fragile ego has never been tested to this extent."

"While he's creating a false pretense of strength and fortitude, internally he is angry, depressed and manic," he told Kruse. "As each day ends, Trump knows he's one day closer to legal and financial troubles. Accordingly, we will all see his behavior deteriorate until it progresses into a full mental breakdown."

Mark Smaller, the past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association explained that Trump's background under a domineering father is likely coming into play.

"His problem is that he has grown up with vulnerability in terms of his self-worth, self-esteem and a clear sense of himself," Smaller explained. "Somebody with these kinds of vulnerabilities, affirmation, being the center of things, is never enough. Because you can't solve these old wounds, these old, narcissistic wounds—you cannot solve them with affirmation, with being at the center of things. You can't because they persist, so that you need more attention, you need more affirmation, you need to be more at the center of things, all the time, more often. And when realities start to interfere with getting that kind of affirmation, you just want more."

According to Kruse, associates of the president who have known him for years say they are worried about where he is headed, not only as he finishes out his presidential term but after he leaves office.

Trump biographer Gwenda Blair suggested he will never acknowledge or accept he lost the election to former Vice President Joe Biden.

"There's no reckoning with reality. He's going to continue to frame it that he won, he was cheated, he's the victim, and he's going to continue to bend reality as best he can," she explained.

Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee added that the near future with a mentally unstable president is fraught with danger.

"The probability of something very bad happening is very high, unacceptably high, and the fact that we don't have guardrails in place, the fact that we are allowing a mentally incapacitated president to continue in the job, in such an important job, for a single day longer, is a truly unacceptable reality," she warned. "We're talking about his access to the most powerful military on the planet and his access to technology that's capable of destroying human civilization many times over."

You can read more here.

In a comprehensive column for the conservative Bulwark, attorney Philip Rotner examined the multiple legal perils Donald Trump is facing after he leaves office before suggesting federal authorities should indict the president — if warranted — even if he pardons himself.

Although it is only speculation at this point that the president will attempt to absolve himself of all federal crimes by bestowing a presidential pardon upon himself before leaving office, there is also speculation that he will resign and then Vice President Mike Pence would issue the pardon once he assumes the presidency — if only briefly until President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in.

As Rotner writes, and has been well documented, the president will lose his immunity from prosecution at the state level once he leaves office but federal crimes is a completely different matter.

As former federal prosecutors Donald Ayers and Dennis Afergut wrote in USA Today, should Trump self-pardon, "… its legality will be decided in the Supreme Court if Trump were indicted" for federal crimes.

As Rotner explained, Justice Department officials — without interference from the incoming Biden administration — should make the call whether the president committed indictable crimes and then proceed to file charges regardless of a possible self-pardon — then let the courts decide whether they can proceed.

Put simply, he wrote, if the president hands himself an all-encompassing pardon all bets should be off."

Differentiating from a Pence pardon, which he wrote would be game over if it came to appeals to the court to overturn it, Rotner wrote that Trump's self-pardon would be a great test case on the limits of presidential power and could serve as a warning for future presidents.

"Federal prosecutors should view a purported self-pardon as an invitation to file any charges warranted by the facts, full stop. Criminal indictments would not only hold him legally accountable, but also would vindicate the principle that in the United States a president is not a king, cannot be his own judge and jury, and does not have the constitutional authority to pardon himself," he wrote.

Using the opinions of some legal scholars who believe, "…self-pardoning is inconsistent with Article I's insistence that someone removed from office by impeachment shall "nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment," the Bulwark columnist wrote that — should the self-pardon situation arise, prosecutors should put the question of the limitation to the test.

"The only way to test a purported self-pardon would be to file charges, let Trump assert a defense that his self-pardon immunizes him from prosecution, and defeat that defense in court," Rotner wrote. "If there's insufficient evidence to support a criminal charge, that's fine. If there's sufficient evidence to indict, that's fine too. If Trump attempts to pardon himself, it should be challenged by bringing any appropriate criminal charges against him."

Rotner went on to state the president not only has a trail of multiple crimes committed while he has been office that may be prosecutable, but he might be involved in criminality trying to disrupt the transfer of power to the new administration.

Explaining, Trump's "crusade to subvert and overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election … has serious criminal implications," and has is clearly in violation of a federal law making it a criminal act "to 'oppress, threaten, or intimidate' any person in the free exercise of any right secured by the Constitution or the laws of the United States. Other statutes dealing with undermining or interfering with elections would also come into play."

However, he suggested investigators might want to avoid going down that rabbit hole writing that it would be a "holy mess."

Summing up, Rotner wrote, "if Trump purports to pardon himself, federal prosecutors should not forgo any prosecution they were otherwise planning to bring," before adding, "Trump should be held accountable outside of the criminal justice system, and the Biden administration should actively pursue concrete changes to the laws, regulations, and norms that govern the presidency."

You can read much more here.