Stop and read this amazing story.

This series of “King Over the Water” posts (the reference is to the Stuart Pretenders, James II, his son and grandson) circles around basic questions: what do Joe Biden, or Democrats or just people who value our civic democracy do if Trumpists or Republicans or some fraction of them refuse to accept that Joe Biden is the legitimate President and continue to believe lies about voter fraud?

It seems the GOP’s strategy in Georgia is to say “radical liberal” enough times that it sticks.

From TPM Reader GS …

Unlike MA, I don’t have expertise in the mechanics of power in DC. S/he lays out a compelling case for why Biden will be able to take effective control of the executive branch.

But the reason MM’s analysis has stuck with me is not what it means for the corridors of the Pentagon, but rather what it means for the public sphere of politics, namely the GOP’s internal dynamics when the only salient topic for the base is reversing the “steal” of 2020.

TPM Reader MM throws some water on TPM Reader MA’s warnings. I should add that to the extent anyone thinks Trump is going to be calling the shots or even influencing the shots at the Pentagon after January 20th I completely agree with MM. What interests me in all this is Trump’s apparent desire to set up something like a court in exile that not only gratifies his ego (central goal) but also keeps the GOP in his thrall and under his control. In a way that is Trump’s ideal presidency: all adulation and no responsibility or even work.

I share an initial with MA, and I think I understand pretty well why he feels as he feels, but I respectfully disagree with him more or less completely.

As to MA’s “military leadership” point, Trump has effectively near-zero ability to affect Joe Biden’s Department of Defense, even in the short term. “Gutting the leadership” is playing musical deck chairs on the Trump Titanic: all those bozos tender their resignations effective 12:01 pm 20 January (or whenever exactly those resignations are formally required to be submitted). Appointing turds like Lewandowski and Bossie to the Defense Business Board is meaningless. They can be dismissed with a stroke of the Biden pen, just as easily as Trump fired the nine “outgoing” members. Long-faced comments about “political loyalty tests” are equally without significance. All of that means less than zero.

I know very little about Lloyd Austin, who appears to be Joe Biden’s pick to be Secretary of Defense. So I want to be clear this criticism isn’t a criticism of him but of his status and background as a recently retired four-star general. It’s the first post-election choice from Biden I find very disappointing.

Like General Mattis, Austin is a recently retired four star General. He will need a congressional waiver to serve as Defense Secretary because the law actually forbids recently retired (less than seven years) general officers from serving as Secretary of Defense. Mattis and George Marshall are the other two who’ve gotten waivers.

Since he’s been pardoned from various crimes related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, Michael Flynn has embarked on a concerning descent into the swamps of QAnon.

Let me share a few more thoughts on the topic of election crimes, and the fact that we are seeing numerous instances of things that are presented as farfetched strategies but are in fact crimes. As noted last week, if a public official pressures an election official to change the results of an election that is a crime. We’ve seen numerous instances of it, most recently from the President himself.

We enforce laws and punish crimes in a number of different ways and with a number of theories underlying the punishment. One reason is to publicly demarcate acceptable and unacceptable behavior. But a key goal is always deterrence. And election crimes are a domain of law in which deterrence is most salient.

These are not crimes of passion. The important ones are not committed by people whose lives are so disordered or tenuous that they’re not thinking of what happens in a week or a decade. These are crimes of strategy and advantage.

At TPM we have a lot to be grateful for this year. I set forth a few of them here. So hopefully not to be wishing for too much but I did want to let you know about something we’re trying to get done before the end of this calendar year. Our goal this year was to get to 35,000 TPM members this year. And we are pretty close. As I write we are at 34,496 subscribers. Can we get to 35,000 in one month?

Well, it’s a tall order. But not impossible. We signed up 418 new members in October and 478 in June. These are net added subscribers. Every publication has ‘churn’, a certain number of people always in the process of unsubscribing or subscribing. So this is about how many more you have at the end of the month. So it’s doable and boy would we like to do it.

So if you’ve never become a subscriber or lapsed and are considering rejoining, now is a great time. Join us. Maybe encourage your TPM-reading friends to do the same. Or maybe you just want to support our independent journalism. These are all really good reasons to sign up. So join us! And thank you to everyone who already has.

TPM Reader MA looks at what Donald Trump’s post-presidency may be like and whether it will be a ‘post-presidency’ at all. It resonated with me and some as yet inchoate thoughts I’ve had on the topic. I saw someone yesterday on Twitter say that Trump was trying to set himself up as the presidential equivalent of an anti-pope, the term for pretender popes during the various schisms of the middle ages. That seemed oddly on the mark. If Late Stuart and Early Hanoverian Great Britain is your reference, he wants to be the ‘king over the water.’

Here’s TPM Reader MA …

Between the intrinsic absurdity of Trump and understandable relief that Biden won, I think there is a dangerous tendency to underestimate what is actually happening politically.