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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

A growing number of opinioners and editorialists are now arguing that those who warned that the corrupt Supreme Court majority was ready to steal the election on behalf of Donald Trump were simply wrong. As evidence they point to the federal judiciary’s general refusal to entertain basically any of the Trump legal team’s increasingly outlandish court challenges and examples like yesterday when the Supreme Court rejected without dissent or comment a challenge to the results of the election in Pennsylvania. But this opinion is wrong.