A much different kind of John Rawls' "veil of ignorance" remains plastered on the grimaces of congressional Republicans. Sen. Pat Toomey, as just one example, said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union": "I don't think there's any doubt at all, there's none in my mind, that the president's behavior after the election was wildly different than his behavior before. He descended into a level of madness and engaged in activity that was absolutely unthinkable and unforgivable."
Toomey's observation comes after Trump's long history of madness and unthinkable behavior, from complimenting the "very fine" neoNazis of Charlottesville to demanding that state election officials defraud voters of their presidential choice. Nevertheless, says Toomey, only Trump's post-election madness and, in particular, unforgivable behavior last Wednesday should be marked as watersheds of the 45th president's psychotic descent.
Forget Trump's brainsick pre-election demeanor and his prior-to-Wednesday's conduct which vividly encouraged violence. He really snapped only when Joe Biden thumped him and later again when his supporters were scaling the walls of the Capitol building and killing a cop.
Yet be it known — which I didn't know until this morning — that on that bloody day, in a manner quite undifferentiated from his preceding path of sociopathic behavior, Trump seamlessly demonstrated that he's fucking crazy. To wit: In a 6:01 p.m., 6 Jan. tweet that we never saw because Twitter instantly deleted it, and, reports the Washington Post, "many in his orbit were particularly furious about," Trump scribbled that "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long."
If he had prophesied some such similarity on 5 Jan., it also would have been just the same old, all-too-familiar Trump. Yet congressional Republicans are enforcing the now-prime directive that a different, less malignly reckless creature occupied the White House before 3 Nov., or 6 Jan.
Our singular consolation lies in our helpful grasp of that one universal constant aside from death and taxes: Republican pols always molest reality.