Mitt Romney says what other Republicans won’t: He’s not voting Trump

Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah crossed a line this week that few if any national Republican officials have broached: rejecting Donald Trump at the ballot box if Trump's the nominee.

Asked by CNN's Kaitlin Collins whether he would vote for Trump over Joe Biden, Romney was unequivocal. 

"No, no, no, absolutely not," he said. Romney explained that whether he aligned with Trump on policy was not his primary consideration.

Instead, he placed character above all and said that having a president who was so "defaulted" of character would undermine America's greatness and our ability to be an international leader.

In many ways, Romney's public break from Trump isn't exactly “stop the presses” stuff. He is retiring at the end of this congressional term, has been a vocal critic of Trump in recent years, and was one of just seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump for inciting a violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

It's also highly doubtful that even a trickle of other notable Republicans will follow in his wake given the cowardice the vast majority of GOP politicians and officials have routinely exhibited over the last decade. 

Kaitlin Collins: Would you vote for Donald Trump over Joe Biden? Mitt Romney: No, absolutely not. @Acyn pic.twitter.com/GMhw2LRNj4

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) February 29, 2024

But Romney's departure is important on two levels. 

First, MAGA has executed a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. But while Trump is still dominating the delegate count, his last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, has won somewhere between 25%-30% of self-identified Republican voters in the contests for which we have exit polling: New Hampshire and South Carolina. In other words, roughly a quarter to a third of self-identified Republicans either still favor old-school conservatism or simply don't want to be part of Trump's party. That's a sizable group of people. And it's entirely plausible that when the dust settles from 2024, some alienated Republicans could make an effort to form their own party, as former Rep. Liz Cheney alluded to earlier this year on ABC's "The View."

“I think that the Republican party itself is clearly so caught up in this cult of personality that it’s very hard to imagine that the party can survive,” Cheney told the hosts in January. “I think increasingly it’s clear that once we get through 2024, we’re gonna have to have something else, something new.”

Romney's assertion that he won't vote for Trump over Biden also brings into question what exactly Haley will do when her time for choosing comes. Haley will not endorse Biden; she has called him "more dangerous" than Trump. But she refers to both as "old men" and specifically calls Trump "unstable and unhinged."

So while Haley won't endorse Biden, she has so far declined to endorse Trump and charged that he cannot win general election. In other words, there's still a slim chance Haley will decline to endorse Trump at the end of her run—and that would be a meaningful departure for all the Republican voters and GOP-leaning independents who have embraced her policies and her mostly unabashed criticism of Trump.

Romney is telling Republican voters that it's okay to say "no, no, no" to Trump. Haley just might, at the very least, tell those same voters that Trump is too unfit to endorse.

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McConnell stepping down is the death rattle of the GOP’s establishment wing

When long-serving Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced Wednesday he would step aside from his Senate leadership post in November, it may have seemed like a natural passing of the baton by a physically frail 82-year-old man. McConnell experienced several public health episodes last fall after suffering a concussion in early 2023. 

But in truth, McConnell's surrender is less of a baton-passing than it is a death rattle of the so-called establishment wing of the Republican Party. Ever since Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination in 2016, McConnell believed he could control Trump, using him as a tool to pack the Supreme Court with conservative extremists and pass the 2017 tax cuts, which have overwhelmingly boosted the bottom line of America's wealthiest households. 

But while McConnell was giddily ticking off his goals, Trump was stealing the party right out from under the veteran leader's nose. By the time Trump lost his November 2020 reelection bid, McConnell, facing two January runoffs in Georgia, realized that he likely couldn't save his Senate majority without Trump's army of MAGA foot soldiers. 

So McConnell began a years-long walk down the plank, fatefully embracing Trump in the Georgia Senate runoffs that resulted in twin losses to Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock and McConnell’s demotion from Senate majority leader to minority Leader. As many predicted, Trump's incessant grousing about the supposedly stolen election helped suppress Republican turnout in the runoffs, ultimately reducing McConnell's final years in leadership to permanent minority status.   

McConnell had several golden opportunities to write a different epitaph for his career. On Jan. 6, 2021—the day after Georgia voters handed McConnell his walking papers as Senate leader—Trump and his followers executed a deadly attack on the U.S. seat of government, providing McConnell a fresh chance to nail shut Trump's future in U.S. politics. 

But McConnell, the highly vaunted political tactician, misread the politics, believing Trump to be "a fading brand," according to reporting by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book, “Peril.”

“There is a clear trend moving,” McConnell predicted, toward a Republican Party that isn't dominated by Trump. “Sucking up to Donald Trump is not a strategy that works,” he added.

But suck up he did. After House Democrats impeached Trump with seven days left in his term, McConnell, still majority leader, delayed the Senate impeachment trial until after Jan. 20, when Democrats took control of the White House and the upper chamber, with the vice president giving Democrats the tie-breaking vote.

McConnell, who didn't lift a finger to help end the country's long national nightmare, reportedly reveled in the idea that Republicans could just follow Democrats' lead. “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” McConnell told two of his Kentucky confidants on Jan. 11.

Of course, Trump's conviction would take 17 Republican votes in addition to the 50 that Senate Democrats provided. And while McConnell eventually paid lip service to the idea that Trump was "practically and morally responsible" for the Jan. 6 riot, he cravenly declined to twist enough arms to muster GOP support for Trump's conviction. The fact that McConnell himself ended up voting to acquit Trump was just icing on the cake. 

McConnell likely figured he could live with one more humiliation on the way to reclaiming the Senate majority in the 2022 midterms, where Republicans had several good pick-up opportunities and history suggested Democrats, with unilateral control of Washington, were doomed. 

In fact, at the same confab where McConnell dubbed Trump a "fading brand," he also imagined mounting fierce opposition to his arch rival if he supported a crop of unelectable losers.

“The only place I can see Trump and me actually at loggerheads would be if he gets behind some clown who clearly can’t win,” McConnell said. “To have a chance of getting the Senate back, you have to have the most electable candidates possible.”

But by October 2021, McConnell would find himself eagerly endorsing the laughably unfit former Georgia football star Herschel Walker as "the only one who can unite the party, defeat Senator Warnock, and help us take back the Senate." 

McConnell and his allies had mounted a feeble public campaign to encourage Walker to sit the cycle out. But in the end, they folded to Trump and embraced his guy, who proved to be an electoral loser alongside a handful of other Trump picks for Senate. 

After entering the midterm cycle with a lot of hope and bluster, Senate Republicans not only failed to pick up a single seat in the supposed year of the "red wave," they actually lost a seat when another MAGA extremist fell short of keeping an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania. 

Fast-forward to today, and Trump's takeover of the Republican Party is nearly complete. Trump is set to handily win the Republican nomination with the steadfast support of his MAGA base. He effectively owns the Republican National Committee, recently engineering the ouster of chair Ronna McDaniel and pushing for his own daughter-in-law to take the helm. He has sucked up the party's small-dollar donations while hobbling the party committees' fundraising appeals to big-dollar donors. He has overtaken the infrastructure of state parties, even as some continue to be consumed by internecine warfare.

All the while, McConnell's resistance to Trump has faded. When Trump recently attacked a bipartisan border deal negotiated by a close McConnell ally, the minority leader acquiesced, helping to kill the deal himself

And despite McConnell's avid support of Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty against Russia, Trump and his congressional allies have so far succeeded in blocking and indefinitely delaying a new round of U.S. aid for the effort.

What is perhaps most clear as McConnell prepares to hand the reins to a new generation of leaders is that Senate Republicans, the last bastion of the old GOP guard, are now on a glide path to resembling House Republicans. Not only have many Senate Republicans embraced MAGA policy tenets such as isolationism, they are adopting MAGA tactics, making the caucus more ungovernable with each passing month. In essence, the less McConnell has led, the less his conference has become capable of being led. 

When veteran Democratic leader and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced late last year that she and her leadership team would step down, she left House Democrats in very good hands—with a succession plan, a capable leadership team on deck, and a wealth of legislative accomplishments to campaign on as they fight to win back the majority in November. 

Pelosi not only left her conference better off, she had done her level best to safeguard the institution of which the leadership had been entrusted to her. And when Democrats are in charge, the House is still functional, even with the slimmest of majorities. 

When McConnell steps aside later this year, he will leave behind a conference, an institution, and a party in disarray—and he will be complicit in having either actively or passively gutted the integrity of all three. 

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Republicans proceed with impeachment effort to spread Russian disinformation

The biggest story of the week, the month, and perhaps the rest of 2024 should be the fact that Republicans predicated their entire impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden on information provided to them by an agent of the Russian government.

Instead, yet another Russian incursion into American politics directly facilitated by Republican officials is falling flat.

Let's take a moment to review the situation with national security expert and ABC News analyst Asha Rangappa, who tweeted, "For real, can we recap: Sitting members of Congress initiated IMPEACHMENT PROCEEDINGS against a U.S. President based on information passed to them by an agent of Russian intelligence. Same members refuse to pass aid to Ukraine. Same members defend Trump."

For real, can we recap: Sitting members of Congress initiated IMPEACHMENT PROCEEDINGS against a U.S. President based on information passed to them by an agent of Russian intelligence. Same members refuse to pass aid to Ukraine. Same members defend Trump. ….

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) February 21, 2024

It's not just that congressional Republicans like House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer and veteran GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa spouted disinformation from a Russian mole: It's that the claim made by the Russian mole was laughable on its face.

As The Bulwark's Tim Miller recounted on "The Next Level" podcast, "This idea that Joe Biden is a master criminal, and he has like a web of bank accounts that are so ... complex ... it would take the FBI and the CIA 10 years to unravel Joe Biden—Joseph Robinette Biden's scheme?"

Miller recalled thinking, no way, "This is crazy."

But not congressional Republicans. They made the claims of FBI informant Alexander Smirnov central—indeed, indispensable—to their case against Biden. 

In May, Comer told Fox News his committee was demanding the FBI release information it had gleaned from Smirnov.

"This is a very crucial piece of our investigation," Comer said.

Grassley took to the Senate floor to pressure the FBI to release the FD-1023 form supposedly detailing "a criminal bribery scheme" that included President Biden and his son, Hunter. Grassley claimed that information came from "a highly credible, long serving FBI confidential human source." 

Last year, Senator Grassley touted the now indicted informant. During the same speech he complained that Judiciary Committee Democrats described his investigation Russian disinformation. According to court filings, the source he’s referencing here has ties to Russian intelligence pic.twitter.com/Iqcy40xeG9

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 20, 2024

Oops, just kidding. 

But now that Smirnov has been indicted and revealed as a Russian agent, Republicans are trying to triage their impeachment inquiry instead of backing away from their disgraced probe of an American president whom they are smearing for political gain.

Comer told Newsmax Wednesday that Smirnov "wasn't an important part" of their investigation "because I didn't even know who he was."

Republicans are also scrubbing references of Smirnov from their investigatory materials, according to reporting from The New Republic's Tori Otten. 

Totally absent from this Republican debacle is any sense of contrition for their roles serving as stooges of the Kremlin in spreading a mountain of lies about a sitting U.S. president.

Comer, Grassley, and others should be fighting off calls for their resignations after betraying the country.

Instead, the impeachment show must go on for Republicans. Otherwise they will have no means by which to uncover and spread more Russian disinformation about their political rival, Joe Biden.  

Democratic voters know Joe Biden is old and MAGA voters like to pretend that Trump isn't just as long in the tooth. Both men were old the last time we did this and the only thing that’s changed is Biden is now a successful incumbent, while Trump is busy juggling trials and indictments.

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New poll shows it’s the greedflation, stupid

Even as post-pandemic inflation continues to fall, many Americans still feel the sting of high prices for basic goods, such as groceries. And Republicans are desperate to blame voter unease on President Joe Biden, particularly as consumer confidence improves and people feel increasingly bullish about their personal finances. 

But new polling on inflation suggests Democrats have an opening to reframe the issue as a discussion about corporate greed—an issue Democrats can turn to their advantage.

In a newly released survey, the progressive consortium Navigator Research found that 85% of voters now view corporate greed as a cause of inflation, with 59% calling it a "major" factor—a 15-percentage-point increase since January 2022. 

"The fact that so many Americans now say that corporate greed is a root cause of inflation is an important turning point," Maryann Cousens, polling and analytics associate for Navigator Research, told Daily Kos.

The feeling among Americans has become so pervasive that Dictionary.com just added the term "greedflation" to its entries, describing it as a rise in prices "caused by corporate executives or boards of directors, property owners, etc., solely to increase profits that are already healthy or excessive."

It's not that voter concerns about inflation are new; it's that voters’ sense that corporations are profiting at the expense of average Americans by spiking prices is at an all-time high in Navigator's polling. 

In fact, voters’ belief that corporate greed is a "major" driver of inflation has jumped 17 points in the past two years among both independents (from 45% to 62%) and Democrats (55% to 72%).

Cousens told Daily Kos that voters are also clamoring for Congress to take action on the issue. Navigator's 2022 midterm survey showed that Congress addressing inflation was "the top priority for midterm voters by a large margin," according to Cousens. 

And while Republicans sought to tag government spending as the biggest cause of inflation in the midterm, some Democrats successfully pointed to corporate greed as the main culprit for soaring prices.

One of them was Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, who narrowly won her hard-fought 2022 reelection bid in the swing state, where gas prices had spiked to $5.67 per gallon amid the campaign.

According to reporting from The Nevada Independent, Cortez Masto staffers said she frequently mentioned pocketbook issues, like the prices of prescription drugs, housing, and gasoline. 

“[She would] say, ‘yeah, I don't like the gas prices either,’ instead of just trying to sweep it under the rug,” Frank Hawk, president of the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters, told the Independent's Gabby Birenbaum. “And then [she] really pointed out what's a little more true, [which] is that you have oil companies and pharmaceutical companies and Big Corporate America making record profits on a daily basis, and we as the middle class are struggling to fill our gas tanks. And that should make us angry. And I think her passion came through, along with her sincerity.”

In other words, there's precedent for Democratic lawmakers to successfully empathize with voters and highlight their work to ease the cost of living. For example, President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which cleared Congress on a party-line vote, has forced a $35 monthly cap on insulin for Medicare beneficiaries. And that price is quickly becoming available to a much wider swath of Americans as drug companies cap their own price or offer savings programs.  

Democrats have plenty to use to contrast themselves with Republicans. The Inflation Reduction Act also empowers Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, and Biden has put forward practical steps to raise taxes on billionaires. In the meantime, Donald Trump is vowing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which, if successful, could strip health insurance from tens of millions of Americans. Trump is also floating the implementation of 10% tariffs on nearly all imports to the U.S, which would functionally raise taxes for U.S. consumers by more than $300 billion a year, according to the conservative Tax Foundation think tank.

Last month, Navigator released polling of likely general election voters in 61 battleground districts, showing that congressional Republicans still hold a 10-point trust advantage on the issue of "fighting inflation." However, once Navigator actually named the lawmakers, Democratic legislators in those districts edged out Republican lawmakers. Forty-five percent of voters said they trust their Democratic representative "a lot" or "some" to fight inflation, while 42% said the same of their GOP representative.   

Navigator's most recent poll found the most persuasive messages on price increases focus on corporate profits and CEO salaries being “at an all-time high, outpacing inflation” while corporations are “raising prices for families and small businesses.” It's a message the White House and Democrats should be pushing proactively, particularly given the fact that the economy is overall on much stronger footing than it was during the 2022 midterms. 

The country’s economic upswing, coupled with Americans increasing belief in greedflation, suggests voters are ripe for an argument that the high price of consumer goods is a product of corporate greed, not economic missteps. And Democrats have a plan for that.

Republicans demanded border security, worked on a compromise deal with Democrats, and now want to blow the whole thing up. Biden is promising to remind Americans every day that the Republican Party is at fault for the lack of solutions to the problems they claim are most important.

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Watch Fox gush over Biden’s economy

News that the U.S. economy grew at a brisk 3.3% annual pace since October wasn't just good: It was great in a lot of ways.

On average, the economy grew a robust 2.5% in 2023—a year in which analysts practically tried to speak a recession into reality. No such luck. In fact, from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the fourth quarter of 2023, the economy grew 3.1%.

The combination of increasing consumption, low unemployment, and falling inflation even had a Fox Business reporter gushing over President Joe Biden's economy.

"It's a sweet spot," remarked Fox Business' Lauren Simonetti, calling consumption "formidable" over the holidays. "We're seeing an economy that is proving resilient—growing as inflation is moderating. That's why I'm calling this the sweet spot, right? Enough growth to cool inflation."

Thank you Dark Brandon! pic.twitter.com/yyE0k4ntWn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 25, 2024

The New York Times' Paul Krugman likewise dubbed it the "Goldilocks economy," neither too hot nor too cold. And Krugman predicts the country's inflationary woes are now over.

In other words, it continues to look as though the Biden administration is overseeing a "soft landing" for the economy—one that supposedly couldn't be achieved.

Indeed, the University of Michigan's survey of consumer sentiment surged to a reading of 78.8 in January, its highest level since July 2021 and a 21.4% increase from a year ago, according to CNBC. A big driver of that increase stems from consumers’ agreement with Krugman that inflation "has turned the corner," as survey director Joanne Hsu put it.

All of this good news is going to drive an already seething Donald Trump absolutely mad—particularly Fox Business analysts swooning over Biden's economy. The same Fox analyst also promised to scour the report "to see if there are signs that maybe the economy doesn't feel as, or isn't as resilient as it might seem."

Shorter Fox-speak: Stay tuned, Trump. We'll invent bad news one way or another!

For anyone who hasn't noticed, Trump is already getting increasingly erratic on his quest to fabricate bad news for Biden:

  • He's livid over his Republican rival Nikki Haley refusing to drop out of the GOP primary after New Hampshire.

  • He’s strong-arming the Republican National Committee into declaring him the nominee after a grand total of two state contests.

  • He's asking Senate Republicans to torpedo a potential border deal with the White House so he can spend the rest of year fear-mongering over a supposed "invasion" of immigrants spearheaded by Biden.

  • He's pushing House Republicans to impeach Biden so he can rail about Biden's supposed corruption.

  • He's rooting for an economic "crash," hopefully sometime very soon.

  • He's promising "bedlam" in the streets of America if he loses the election (a chaos candidate promising chaos if The People vote against chaos).

  • And he's agitating for full immunity from absolutely any action—including murder—he takes as president.

It's January, folks, and Trump is already coming off the rails despite the fact that he's basically cruising to the Republican nomination.

It's a palpable show of desperation sprung from a place of weakness. Trump knows New Hampshire and Iowa both exposed serious cracks in his general election voting coalition. The turnout and makeup of the electorate in both states suggests he isn't expanding the universe of Republican voters. He's simply culling the party down to a smaller, harder-right faction of the electorate.

In short, Trump's not adding, he's subtracting. And if he's going to ride that smaller slice of the electorate to victory, he's going to need to trash the country in every way possible in order to depress turnout for Biden.

That’s all fine by Trump because the main impetus of his every move is the sheer terror of spending his last living years in a jail cell. If he has to single-handedly unravel the country on his quest for freedom, so be it.

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Trump allies ridicule GOP impeachment inquiry for failing to find dirt on Biden

As he closes in on the Republican nomination, Donald Trump needs House Republicans to deliver an equalizer for him in the general election: an impeachment of President Joe Biden.

But after a yearlong investigation led by the House oversight committee chair, Rep. James Comer, Republicans seem no closer to digging up any actionable dirt on Biden. That leads to two conclusions:

  1. If the pro-Trump House GOP conference hasn't found anything on Biden, it's unlikely anything legally actionable exists.

  2. It becomes even more imperative for House Republicans to scrape together something Trump can work with.

After all, when pundits call him the twice-impeached, four-time indictee, Trump has to be able to point at Biden and say he's the one who's really corrupt. Just look at what Congress found on him. It's very reminiscent of Trump attempting to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into opening a bogus investigation into Biden. Only now, Trump has so many legal liabilities, he needs more than just the specter of wrongdoing—he needs the goods. And according to some fascinating reporting from The Messenger's Stephen Neukam, Trump has taken note of the fact that he's currently got nothing on which to spin a corruption narrative.

“Comer has cast a wide net and caught very little fish. That is a big problem for him,” one ally of Trump told The Messenger.

The reporting is informed by more than a dozen anonymous interviews, including a House Republican colleague who calls Comer's inquiry a "parade of embarrassments."

“One would be hard pressed to find the best moment for James Comer in the Oversight Committee,” the GOP lawmaker said.

But in many ways, the leaks seem specifically designed to put Comer on notice that he not only needs to produce, but he'll be singularly on the hook if he doesn't.

“James Comer continues to embarrass himself and House Republicans. He screws up over and over and over," said a source identified as "close" to House GOP leadership, who appeared to be playing CYA for the leadership team. The source's big fear was that Comer would ultimately fail to provide the foundation necessary (i.e. evidence) to follow through with impeaching Biden.

“I don’t know how Republicans actually impeach the president based on [Comer's] clueless investigation and lack of leadership,” said the source.

The quotes had the feel of a failed campaign staff pointing fingers at each other as the ship goes down, only the campaign in this case is the Republican effort to impeach Biden.

Publicly, of course, House leaders are expressing full confidence in Comer.

"I am grateful for the superb efforts of Chairman Comer," Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement, while House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Comer had "worked tirelessly" on the investigation.

But Comer's misfires have become legendary: providing nothing substantive, just a series of accusations and innuendo that don't amount to a hill of beans. In fact, Comer's investigation has become a punch line in the media. As Daily Kos' Mark Sumner wrote in November, Comer had uncovered another "smoking water pistol."

In fact, just last month, CNN's Jake Tapper mocked Comer during a live interview.

Watch only Jake Tapper for the entire 45 seconds of this ridiculous interview with James Comer Pyle. The facial expressions are classic. The GOP deemed THIS guy as their best person to get Joe and Hunter Biden. Republicans embarrass the U.S. daily.pic.twitter.com/eR0jN5odc5

— BigBlueWaveUSA® 🇺🇸🌊🇺🇦 (@BigBlueWaveUSA) December 8, 2023

And when the oversight committee met earlier this month to debate holding Hunter Biden in contempt for refusing to give closed-door testimony, the younger Biden made a laughingstock of House Republicans by staging a surprise press conference in which he volunteered to provide public testimony.

“It seems like they got played by Hunter Biden,” a senior House GOP aide told The Messenger. “It was a disaster. They looked like buffoons.”

To sum up, the boss needs production, Comer has become a national joke, and the House leadership is happily hanging him out to dry.

In response, Comer issued a statement through a spokesperson saying that oversight, along with the Judiciary and Ways and Means committees, are coordinating to "determine whether President Biden's conduct warrants articles of impeachment."

Yeah, that's not gonna cut it.

"You have to start producing," one Trump ally said. "The base is starting to get more and more frustrated with him because they see all this smoke but they don’t see the movement.”

If that sounds like a mob-boss threat, that’s because it is.

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Majority of Americans open to kicking Trump off state ballots

 Whether by hook or by crook, a majority of Americans—56%—are willing to see Donald Trump kicked off some or all state ballots, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released Friday.

Two state-level rulings in Colorado and Maine have disqualified Trump from the ballot. Feelings about those rulings were more mixed: 49% support the decisions, while 46% oppose them.

But when it comes to the Supreme Court tackling the question of whether Trump can be barred from ballots under the 14th Amendment, 30% said the high court should remove him from all ballots, while 26% said the court should let states decide Trump's fate. Just 39% said Trump should be kept on the ballot in all states—a remarkably low percentage for a major-party presidential front-runner.

The survey also tested support for the federal and state charges against Trump, as well as House Republicans' impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

At base, 56% support the charges against Trump, while 39%—there's that number again— oppose the charges. On the Biden impeachment inquiry, just 44% support it, while 51% oppose it.

But in terms of "strong" support, 41% strongly support charging Trump, while just 26% strongly support opening an impeachment inquiry into Biden.

That means House Republicans are fixated on devoting a bunch of time and energy during a presidential cycle to a matter that only a quarter of voters feel passionately—and that a 51% majority opposes.

That's the definition of fringe politics: elevating the desires of about a quarter of the public over those of the majority of Americans.

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Majority of Americans open to kicking Trump off state ballots

 Whether by hook or by crook, a majority of Americans—56%—are willing to see Donald Trump kicked off some or all state ballots, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released Friday.

Two state-level rulings in Colorado and Maine have disqualified Trump from the ballot. Feelings about those rulings were more mixed: 49% support the decisions, while 46% oppose them.

But when it comes to the Supreme Court tackling the question of whether Trump can be barred from ballots under the 14th Amendment, 30% said the high court should remove him from all ballots, while 26% said the court should let states decide Trump's fate. Just 39% said Trump should be kept on the ballot in all states—a remarkably low percentage for a major-party presidential front-runner.

The survey also tested support for the federal and state charges against Trump, as well as House Republicans' impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

At base, 56% support the charges against Trump, while 39%—there's that number again— oppose the charges. On the Biden impeachment inquiry, just 44% support it, while 51% oppose it.

But in terms of "strong" support, 41% strongly support charging Trump, while just 26% strongly support opening an impeachment inquiry into Biden.

That means House Republicans are fixated on devoting a bunch of time and energy during a presidential cycle to a matter that only a quarter of voters feel passionately—and that a 51% majority opposes.

That's the definition of fringe politics: elevating the desires of about a quarter of the public over those of the majority of Americans.

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McConnell unwittingly explains why Trump now owns the Republican Party

During the same February 2021 impeachment trial speech in which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called Donald Trump "practically and morally responsible" for the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, McConnell also argued that impeachment alone was never intended to be "the final forum" for justice.

"Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office—as an ordinary citizen," McConnell said as he sought to explain away the vote he had cast to acquit Trump.

"We have a criminal justice system in this country," McConnell continued. "We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one."

Yet on Tuesday when McConnell was asked if he still believes Trump isn't immune from prosecution, McConnell dodged the question, choosing instead to reframe the legal query as an electoral matter.

"Well, my view of the presidential race is that I choose not to get involved in it, and comment about any of the people running for the Republican nomination," McConnell responded.

Q: “You had argued, after voting to acquit the former president that presidents are not immune from prosecution is that still your view?” McConnell: “I choose not to get involved...and comment about any of the people running for the Republican nomination.” pic.twitter.com/uhVut62se8

— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) January 9, 2024

If anyone wonders why Trump now owns the GOP, they need look no further than the feckless leadership of McConnell, who has failed at every turn to challenge Trump's takeover of the party.

It's a point former Rep. Liz Cheney has made repeatedly during her book tour for "Oath and Honor." In the book, Cheney writes that McConnell originally seemed "firm in his view" that Trump should be impeached. But as the vote approached, he got squishy and ultimately folded.

“Leader McConnell, who had made a career out of savvy political calculation and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, got this one wrong,” Cheney writes.

After years of McConnell worship by Beltway journalists, the fact that he 100% whiffed on the most consequential issue of our time might finally be sinking into the psyche of some political journalists and analysts.

As former U.S. attorney, deputy assistant attorney general, and “Talking Feds” host Harry Litman noted this week on NPR's “Trump Trials” podcast, we would never be here if McConnell hadn't "blinked" on convicting Trump.

"When you think of all the forks in the road over the last several years, that one moment with McConnell who was obviously saying that [Trump] was guilty and should have been convicted, stands out to me as the absolute road not taken," Litman observed.

That would have been the most "straight-forward" and appropriate way for McConnell to have "solved this national nightmare," Litman added, "and he blinked."

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House Republicans hand Democrats an early 2024 gift: A fact-free impeachment inquiry

House Republicans voted unanimously Wednesday to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. They will live to regret it.

Even under the best and most convincing of circumstances, impeachments are typically unpopular. After Donald Trump sicced a violent mob on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, only a slender majority of Americans supported impeaching him. A Monmouth University poll conducted shortly after Trump's impeachment on Jan. 13 found that 56% of Americans favored his impeachment and Senate conviction, including 92% of Democrats but just 52% of independents, despite the Jan. 6 insurrection unfolding on live television for all of America to see.

Fast forward to this week, with Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado telling CNN Monday, "This is not the way to run a Congress. This is not the way to run a House. We should not be engaging in retribution politics, in retribution impeachments.”

Still, Buck couldn’t bring himself to buck his fellow Republicans on the party-line vote.

Republican Rep. Ken Buck: “This is not the way to run a Congress. This is not the way to run a House. We should not be engaging in retribution politics, in retribution impeachments.” pic.twitter.com/YgJJFRpRz8

— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) December 12, 2023

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa admitted Wednesday that Republicans had "no evidence" on which to conclude the president is guilty of any high crimes or misdemeanors.

"I'm going to follow the facts where they are, and the facts haven't taken me to that point where I can say the president is guilty of anything," Grassley told CNN's Manu Raju.

Amazing. Chuck Grassley admits "I have no evidence ... the fact haven't taken me to that point where I can say the president is guilty of anything." pic.twitter.com/fCuVcNLTB0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 13, 2023

This impeachment should be embarrassing to Republicans, and yet the bubble of far-right politics has given them the courage of their fact-free convictions.

Democrats should thank them. After months of polling showing a tight 2024 presidential contest with whiffs of sagging Democratic enthusiasm for Biden's reelection, Republicans have handed Democrats a base-energizer.

Democratic voters will be rightfully outraged that Republicans would launch an inquiry when they have zero supporting evidence despite a year-long investigation into Biden’s supposed misdeeds that turned up squat.

Just wait for the polling. Republicans may be hermetically sealed from reality, but the majority of voters are not—particularly those in some 17 Biden-won swing districts that are currently represented by Republicans.

Need detailed info on the 18 Biden-Republican districts in the House? We've got you covered at this link! https://t.co/lEcCvxvfqi (Trump-Democratic districts are on a second tab) pic.twitter.com/i3aXnHzUys

— Daily Kos Elections (@DKElections) October 18, 2023

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