This past week, Donald Trump returned to Capitol Hill.  With a few exceptions, he was welcomed by Republican lawmakers as if he wasn’t a convicted felon who had encouraged a riot attack on the Capitol in 2021. He was the same guy who urged them to not accept the election results for him (the Congressional Republicans did rather well so their races weren’t stolen, only his), chose to pout all the way home, and not attend his successor’s inauguration. 

And, there they stood, grinning and clapping as if he wasn’t still under indictment for other crimes including the hiding of classified documents.

It was especially amusing to watch the preening Vice Presidential aspirants as they fell over each other in their praise of the man. The whole thing reminded me of a Marx Brothers comedy.
I think the likely winner of the VP groveling contest will be JD Vance. He looks good (a Trump requirement), doesn’t generally sound crazy, and won’t upstage the boss. He will explain what Trump really meant when he said he couldn’t get a fair trial because the judge was of Hispanic descent in the Trump University trial, or when he disparages Africans as having “shithole countries,” or any other comments that need to be modified to make them less likely to lose to non-MAGA voters.

Meanwhile, some Democrats believe if Biden does poorly in the June 27 debate, given the polling, he might decide not to run after all. That is what we describe as magical thinking.

The contest is set with all of its problems. It is hard to be hopeful that we can come out of this as a stronger country… but, admittedly, stranger things have happened. Just not recently.