Scanning the channels I’m seeing lots of commentators saying it “just got a lot harder to vote to acquit.” Alas, with the exception of three or four who already signaled an openness to conviction, Republican senators won’t to find it hard at all.

It was an incredibly powerful presentation – and a lot of it is still coming. But the real audience for this is outside the chamber. Inside the chamber, with the possible exception of some of the Republican senators who voted for the constitutionality of the trial I would be quite surprised if any minds were changed by today’s presentation.

It’s a bleak commentary. But that is the reality we find ourselves in.

As if we needed more evidence after yesterday’s performance that Trump’s hodge-podge legal defense wasn’t going great, this morning we learned that one of his own lawyers sued him last year.

And he sued him over the very issue that he will be defending the ex-president against.

If you’re a regular TPM Reader the topic of militias and rightist paramilitaries, which have been in the news since January 6th, is nothing new to you. Many of us have been watching this development going back at least 25 years. The roots of the phenomenon of course go back decades further. It has been a hallmark of our coverage for twenty years that ‘fringe’ right wing groups are much more central to what drives national politics than establishment reportage allows. Today we see that reality come to the fore in a newly visible way as state Republican parties especially cultivate highly armed paramilitaries as auxiliaries to their work in electoral politics.

From TPM Reader AB …

I hadn’t fully realized what the change for me personally was until this afternoon while watching the video that the House Managers showed of the insurrection. It wasn’t seeing the terrorists storming the building, it was before that. It was listening to him speak as President on the Ellipse. At that moment I realized how he had affected me. I remembered how hard it was to listen to him speak without getting angry in a way that no other politician, Republican or Democrat, had done. Then after that moment seeing the video of the insurrection reminded me of the rage I felt on the sixth. I finally understand in just a small way, how people with PTSD are triggered. The feeling was visceral and frightening. Again, this was not just the video of the mob, it was also video of the President’s speech. I now realize the relief that I felt, while slow to materialize, is real, and way bigger than I thought it was.

Democrats have plenty of compelling evidence against the former president — mostly because everything he’s being impeached for, he did out loud, very much in the open.

TPM Reader JL follows up on my post about the size the recovery package. This is the logical risk of too large a package. What I referenced yesterday was what seemed most salient from Summer’s column: even Summers, as the spokesman for traditional deficit concern and austerity, himself only seemed able to make a half-hearted argument about building up inflationary pressures in the economy. And that to me was the most telling thing about it.

Ex-President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in the Senate is set to begin tomorrow and there’s very little we know definitively about how proceedings will work — aside from the fact that Trump himself has no plans to make an appearance.

There is now a debate over whether to change the income caps for eligibility for those $2,000 checks. (Actually, it’s an additional $1,400 which combined with the $600 from December will equal $2,000.) Specifically, the discussion is whether to lower the income cap from $75,000 to $50,000.

This is a major, major mistake.

From TPM Reader CC …

One of the things it would be hard for you to grasp totally is the extent to which Trump’s omnipresence was not just limited to the U.S. It was felt around the world and here in Australia he was covered and became part of everyday conversation so much more than Obama (except for Obama’s “honeymoon” period). Now he is gone and the coverage of US politics has really dialed back because it is so much more normal than it was. I think if it was not for COVID19 and how bad it is in America (particularly relative to here) the coverage would be virtually non-existent. So our de-trumping story is like a withdrawal from more than just Trump. It will be interesting to see what coverage of the impeachment trial will be but for the moment I don’t think I am the only Australian grateful to be able to ignore you again for a while.

There might have been a brief period when the conservative, Rupert Murdoch-owned cable news network earned a sliver of respect from competitors over its coverage of Trump — most notably when it refused to retract its Arizona call for Biden, even after coming under pressure.

But it appears nature is healing. Fox News is back to its Obama-era fixations on tan suit-variety non scandals.