Donald Trump’s trial for incitement to insurrection is bound by two key facts. First is the fact that all but three or four Republican senators will vote to acquit him no matter what. The second is the nature of ‘incitement’ as a crime. Incitement is at the outer bounds of what we normally consider to be criminal actions inasmuch as it amounts to using words to get other people to do things absent compulsion. It is a crime, as it should be, but in a criminal trial context it is a high bar for prosecutors to meet. Still, we are left to consider how much the President inspired and directed what happened on January 6th, 2021.

The House managers are doing a good job of it. But in terms of what the President thought he was doing … well, he told us in real time.

From TPM Reader CB …

I wanted to share my De-Trumping story, because I think it’s fairly unique.

Like a lot of people, I swore before the 2016 election I’d leave the United States if Trump got elected. Unlike a lot of people, I followed through. It took a little bit, but I switched to a job I could work remotely, sold my stuff, and left in mid-2018.

Kevin McCarthy is far and away the weakest congressional leader, in either party or house of Congress, in living memory. Indeed, you have to go deep into American history to find anyone comparable. And if you go too far back you get to periods when the role of House and Senate leaders were just too different to make any comparisons. So with this fact in hand, I’ve heard a number of people ask just how it is he manages to remain leader. But this question mistakes the structure of the current Republican congressional party, especially in the House. McCarthy is leader precisely because he is as weak as he is. It’s a feature, not a bug.

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.