President Trump has made clear repeatedly over the last week that he is not only vindicated but wants payback meted out against his political opponents. Susan Collins lamely claimed Trump had learned his lesson by being impeached. Even she had to take that back and say she hoped he had. Numerous press reports from news organizations with strong sourcing inside the White House say that Trump not only feels vindicated and wants payback but feels something like invincible. All the ‘adults in the room’ told him not to do this and not to do that. He did all of it and more and what happened? He’s still President. He’s even reasonably well positioned for reelection. So, he reasons, he was right all along and he can in fact do anything he wants.

Along those lines I want to point out just two things we’ve learned in the last forty-eight hours.

Exactly 21 years and six days ago, former President Bill Clinton took to the podium in the White House Rose Garden and delivered a stone-faced apology to the American people for “what I said and did.”

It’s hardly surprising, but President Trump just used the National Prayer Breakfast to drag his impeachment foes, pointedly mocking Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) for his declaration of faith from the Senate floor and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

President Trump will be acquitted today. We can’t talk around that fact.

But that doesn’t mean that the conduct that put him in this pinch in the first place will be swept under the rug. House Judiciary Committee Chair and impeachment manager Jerry Nadler (D-NY) reassured reporters this morning that it is “likely” his committee will issue that subpoena that former National Security Adviser John Bolton has been begging for for weeks.

Tierney Sneed and I (but, mostly Tierney) have been keeping close tabs on the main excuses Republican senators are offering President Trump to justify their ultimate acquittal votes, which will become concrete at 4:00 p.m. ET Wednesday.

What a mess.

Monday, around 3 p.m., Bloomberg News’ Tyler Pager published a story: Iowa Precinct Chairs Report Issues Using Caucus App, Potentially Delaying Results.

That, it turns out, was the tip of a monstrous iceberg.

I wanted to share TPM Reader RB’s more positive take on the Iowa Caucus, if not this particular execution of it. And that prompts me to add this slight qualification of my condemnation. These are great participatory civic exercises. You can see that watching them. They’re just not substitutes for elections. That may be a sort of impossible answer since if they don’t “count” people wouldn’t participate in the same way. But both can be true. We have expectations of elections. And the key one is that everyone gets a voice, an equal voice, at least on the foundational act of voting. Not just everyone in the sense of people who can’t necessarily spend a whole evening out doing this — covering differences in class, having children, working night jobs. That also means people who simply do not want to publicly announce their political beliefs or get hassled by neighbors or strangers about changing their votes.

With that, TPM Reader RB …