Trump loyalist Florida Rep. Brian Mast is now a traitor to his country, but more to the point he is also dishonest, politically craven, and a garbage human being. So let's dispense with this quickly.
During the impeachment vote, Mast was one of many House Republicans attempting to straddle the thin line of claiming to be outraged by last week's armed insurrection against Congress while still insisting that Donald Trump's role in inciting attempted murders was not impeachable because reasons. The argument was insincere, lie-based, and about what you would expect from one of the traitors who himself egged on violence with hoax claims of election flaws that did not exist.
Indeed, Mast was one of those lawmakers to rise in challenge to the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6 immediately before a mob entered the building with the intent of capturing or murdering those who would not sign on to the same Trump-promoted false claims. There is a direct line between Mast's lies and multiple deaths, and between Mast's lies and the now-broken chain of "peaceful transition of power" that lasted from the Civil War until the time Brian Mast was elected to Congress. He is a seditionist, and was before the violence began.
One of Mast's pillars of argument was that you could not pin the armed insurrection on Trump because there was no evidence Trump did the thing everyone in the nation saw him doing: "Has any one of those individuals who brought violence to this Capitol been brought here to answer if they did that because of our president?" He said this very smugly, like a stupid person believing themselves to be the first in history to notice that the sun and moon looked to be approximately the same size, and waited for a response that he knew would not come because speeches on the floor of Congress do not generally follow a call-and-response format.
Here ya go, sport. Video of the insurrectionists asserting that they were "invited" into the building by Donald Trump.
We done here? Yeah, probably.
There's not going to be the wholesale expulsion of seditionists and traitors responsible for these deaths because the House Republican caucus is a collection of criminals who fully intend to immunize each other even for insurrection—they will purge the non-seditionists like (shudder) Liz Cheney and elevate the most vocal promotors of the party's democracy-attacking lies to ever-higher positions. That’s too bad, but it does not absolve them of the provably false claims that led to murders and now to law enforcement warnings of a new possible era of conservative-stoked terrorism. They are still the insurrection's ringleaders, and it falls on all the rest of us to treat them with the appropriate amount of contempt and disgust for the rest of their lives.
Rep. Brian Mast, your hoaxes and lies led to an attempt on your colleagues' lives. You are a traitor to your nation. And you are in crowded company.
