I think I'll also link Woodward and Bernstein's latest analysis here, which gives a nice, succinct history lesson on Nixon's secret efforts to play dirty in his presidential elections.

Unlike Nixon, Trump accomplished his subversion largely in public.

I have to admit, this is the true genius of Trump's ongoing attempts to subvert democracy. We know that keeping conspiracies secret becomes effectively impossible the larger the number of people are involved. That's what got Nixon. Trump doing his seditions very much in the open gets around this problem. Like.. what are we really going to learn from the January 6th hearings that anyone paying attention doesn't already know? There might be some surprises, or juicy receipts, but Woodward and Bernstein are right; It's almost impossible to arrive at any other conclusion except that Trump knowingly committed sedition against the U.S. by attempting to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. The publicly available evidence we already have is more than enough to build the case. Committing sedition in the public domain gives some appearance of plausible deniability, that Trump doesn't know what he's doing (present tense!) is illegal, and also defuses a lot of bombshell revelations like the ones during the Watergate hearings that took down Nixon.

If DoJ decides to prosecute Trump Himself, who cares? He'll campaign and fundraise on it, and he'll easily manage to delay any actual legal consequence with the same "appealing the rejected appeal of the rejected appeal of the rejected appeal" tactic until Jan. 20, 2025, and that'll be that. More and more, and because of articles like the Politico piece above, I think it's very possible that we'll have no idea who is the legitimate winner of the next presidential election. And not for a few days. Forever. And who knows, the secret service might just let Trump walk right back in through the front door, uncontested.

One thing that I don't hear much of: Trump clearly thought he'd effectively captured SCOTUS, and they'd take up enough cases initiated by Giuliani et al. to overturn battle ground states' results, and he'd remain POTUS. He was wrong, in 2020 and early 2021. He may not be wrong in 2024. SCOTUS is showing everyone right now, with recent and upcoming rulings and the leaked abortion memo, that they are increasingly unconcerned with representing even a supermajority of Americans' views on far too many issues.

If you want, you can replace "Trump" with "DeSantis", it doesn't matter. The plan to seize the executive branch in 2024 will be the same, and there will be no mass disillusionment or voter turnout enough to defeat fascism, I'm afraid. Maybe I can put out enough content mocking American fascists to earn me an early spot in the gulags.