The Republican world has gotten very simple. If you are a defender of Donald J. Trump, the Dear Leader figure whose word must not be questioned and whose petty whims can nullify whichever laws they are pointed at, much less the party's own deeply held beliefs of three minutes ago, you are Good.
If, on the other hand, you contradict Dear Leader's pronouncements with facts or data, or point out legal boundaries that might complicate Dear Leader's most recent declared whim, or God help you have witnessed wrongdoing by Dear Leader and feel obliged to say so, you are a liberal. Or a socialist. Or a member of the dark underbelly of law-knowers and crime-stoppers now known as the Deep State. If this sounds like fascism it is because it is, without a doubt, fascism, complete with its ethnic obsessions, cynical performative Christianity, and cartoonish rally hyper-masculinity.
You might think it uncanny that absolutely every government worker, administration member, member of the public, and sexual assault victim is quickly exposed by Dear Leader's cult and, in particular, his own idiot failson as being aNtI-AmERiCaN, secretly in league with Whatever. You're right, it is uncanny, because it is all made up. It is propaganda.
Dear Leader's brigades of greasy internet brownboxers can invent a reason why each and every one of Dear Leader's detractors is a secret America-hater without so much as knowing the person's name, and Donald Trump or his failson will somehow find it and launch it from its conspiracy-circle origins to Big Time Dear Leader Idiot Power Hour status within 48 hours. You would have to ask a historian whether all fascist movements are led and populated with people as brick-stupid as the current version, but after decades of purging book-learners and anyone with a sense of decency from the party it was all but assured that the Republican incarnation would smell of paste-eating and doorknob-licking.
So that is all you need to know about Biff and Biff Jr.'s new attacks on Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Vindman witnessed the effort to extort Ukrainian leaders into publicly announcing fraudulent probes of Trump's enemies (the Bidens and the Deep State); he testified about what he witnessed, no more or less, to House investigators, and now he is an alleged anti-American who, says Some Guy On The Internet, once said Bad Things about America and who cannot possibly be trusted.
Donald Trump Jr.'s involvement is the paste that holds the rest of it together; where Uday finds the time to keep tabs on every single emerging conspiracy theory in America today remains a stumper, but he clearly has inherited whatever bowel condition confines his father to toilet-tweeting for hours at a time.
They will attack this witness and every other, just as they have. Republicans looking to score points with Dear Leader, like Jim Jordan and Lindsey Graham, will whip themselves into a froth about every single witness being anti-American or a secret conspirator. Republicans looking to protect their own status, and nation be damned, will back them as they do it. Every time.
All hail Dear Leader, who can do whatever crime he wants because he just can, that's why. All those that speak against him are the Enemy, because they just are, that's why. Whether the Republicans stumbled into fascism or plotted their own course no longer matters. They could choose to leave it, and do not.
