You can hear the unease with Trump from Orlando, where House Republicans are on a glitzy "retreat" from the exhausting labors of ... whatever it is they do when in Washington.
The ink on the former president and future felon's incitement-to-riot posts had not yet dried when Kevin McCarthy stood athwart impending history, yelling Stop. "I don’t think people should protest this stuff," burbled the slithery Speaker at a press conference. But who can blame him? When the criminal defendant is your guy, "this stuff" is much more preferable to "this indictment."
McCarthy went on to put words in Trump's big mouth. What the insufferable scofflaw had actually posted was a call for crackpots and conspiracy theorists to "educate people about what’s going on," clarified the Speaker. Trump was not "talking in a harmful way." No no no. "Nobody should harm one another," continued McCarthy in characteristically writhing syntax. "If was this [sic] to happen. we want calmness out there." If what was to happen? Anyway, please, no "violence or harm," he urged. Credit due.
I'm rather skeptical, however, that Trump was tossing credit slips McCarthy's way. Nor could he have been pleased with Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who both dismissed the Trumpian need for violence and harm. "I don’t need to protest," said the cerebral cipher from Georgia (who now gets quoted by the national press as much as the Speaker of the House; this is the depth to which the Republican Party has sunk). Marge instead intends, through the vote, to "end this extreme corruption in America." (The Hill)
But no other absurdity could top McCarthy's notation that Jim Jordan, the always levelheaded chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is expected to investigate any federal funding of Trump's "politically motivated prosecutions," because, said Kevin, "the last thing we want to have is somebody putting their thumb on the scale simply because they don’t agree with somebody else’s political view."
Meanwhile, Trump's Saturday screeds about a Tuesday arrest are, of course, unraveling. In a slight indictment delay, the Manhattan grand jury may hear today from a former lawyer of Michael Cohen, the prosecution's chief witness in the Donald's seemy hush-money scheme, which acted as an illegal, 2016 campaign contribution. The lawyer, at Camp Trump's request, means to discredit Cohen's testimony and character. At any rate, as The NY Times reports, "a Tuesday surrender was unlikely, given the need to arrange timing, travel and other logistics."
Incidentally, the location of Trump's next bund rally carries as much villainous meaning as Ronald Reagan's 1980 "states'-rights" speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil-rights workers were murdered in 1964. Thirty years ago, almost to the day, four federal agents and six gun-loving extremists died in Waco, Texas — where Trump, it just so happens, will soon be speaking.