Heather Cox Richardson today:

[applegrove]

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-30-2022

"SNIP......

“t’s both alarming and yet utterly predictable that Trump would toss the gasoline of racial allegations onto his flaming pile of grievances, knowing how that will play with the Confederate flag aficionados within the ex-president’s cult,” Bunch wrote. Trump, he said, “is seeking to start a race war.”

But, as a sign of just how tied the Republican Party is to the former president now, on ABC News’s This Week, today, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) refused to rule out supporting Trump in 2024 despite last night’s incendiary speech. 

Collins’s reluctance to offend the former president didn’t do her much good: tonight, in an astounding statement, he referred to her as “Wacky Susan Collins.”

The statement was astounding not because he was insulting a Republican senator. 

Referring to bipartisan congressional discussions about clarifying the law to guarantee that no one ever again will argue that the vice president can overturn the results of an election (this is where Collins came up), Trump claimed those discussions themselves proved the plan his team came up with was, in fact, legal. (It is not.) He went on to say: “Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” 

......SNIP"