The drama over Trump threatening to fire Bill Barr is so surreal, so absurd, so dark inasmuch as it is really just the pitiful acting out of a terrified, impulsive man raging against the dying of his vast and untrammeled power. We can focus on the craziness of Trump’s turning on Barr, who has abused his office so willingly and fulsomely on Trump’s behalf. But the reality is it simply doesn’t matter. Even that is irrelevant at this point. The administration is over. Barr is just there in a caretaker role. The people have already fired all of them.

The ginger detachment commences.

And it appears the squirm away from Trumpism will involve quite a lot of calculated political maze navigation for the RNC.

This story from the AP this afternoon, about a Trump political fixer booted from Main Justice, literally banned from the building, is part of a fascinating, much broader and highly significant story. Across the government, the agencies, departments, even in some cases Trump’s own appointees are becoming more resistant to his direction and power. I basically guarantee you that showing this woman the door at the DOJ does not happen before President Trump’s defeat.

We’ve seen this already most clearly at CDC, NIH and FDA. Fauci is back making statements from the White House. Nancy Messonnier, the CDC official who sounded the first real alarm about COVID back in February, suddenly piped up again last week after eight months of silence. The FDA is showing more outward resistance to President Trump’s demands over its vaccine approval process. Scott Atlas suddenly got the boot. But with the health care bureaucracy the process is a bit more complicated because Trump seems largely to have lost interest in COVID after the election. There’s resistance. But aside from his pet issue of emergency approvals for “his” vaccines Trump really doesn’t seem to care about COVID anymore. At the Justice Department and the Census Bureau developments Tierney Sneed has been covering we see the broader story: Donald Trump’s power as President is disintegrating.

I want to recommend a couple articles to you.

It turns out, President Trump’s top allies got a warning this summer that should have foreshadowed where we find ourselves now in December.

I wanted to add my voice to David’s note of praise and appreciation for the TPM team over this arduous year. In case you didn’t see it David reprinted one of his emails to staff as we started the process of locking down our operations in New York and DC back in March. We were actually early in the process, beginning a plan for redeploying entirely to remote work before most organizations were even considering it. In the event things moved so rapidly when the crisis hit, especially in New York City, that the difference between being “early” and not only ended up being a few days.

Adding to the oddity, all surreal in retrospect, was that we held a long-planned TPM event in New York City on March 5th, the day before our official decision to close down on March 6th and only a few days before our last day in the office on March 11th.

A slew of news organizations have now confirmed that this morning President Trump called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and asked him to convince the state legislature to overturn the results of the election. Kemp refused. (Trump makes weird heroes.) We need to understand that these are literally crimes. I don’t mean moral lapses or things that are wrong. They’re crimes. If I call up someone at the Board of Elections in New York and try to convince them to change the vote numbers or throw away ballots, that’s a crime. I would certainly be charged with a crime. Their saying no doesn’t absolve me of the crime. It’s no defense. The higher up you are on the totem pole the graver a crime it becomes because your chances of success are far greater. Again, these are crimes.

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.

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.