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“We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil,” the Sunrise Movement wrote on social media as wildfires rage across Canada.

First of all, I could barely stay awake. It was only a 25-minute speech, and it’s not like 9:25 p.m. is my bedtime, but President Donald Trump’s affect was so strained, his rhetoric so ploddingly predictable, and his “evidence” so vaporous that my mind started wandering at around 9:13. I wondered if it was only me, because I’m obviously not the most objective observer in the world when it comes to Trump, so afterward I flipped on Fox News for a few minutes, long enough to see that even Sean Hannity couldn’t rouse himself into a state of excitation.So Trump’s much-ballyhooed (chiefly by him) speech Thursday night was a dud. So say I; so, in not so many words, said Hannity (perhaps lurking in the corners of his mind last night was the nearly $800 million his network paid out in a legal settlement after it was caught promoting Trump’s lies); so said Playbook this morning (“Trump’s anticlimax”); so said the gang on Morning Joe. That’s good. It tells us that that power he had over people and institutions a year or 15 months ago has evanesced.More than that, it was just an embarrassing moment for the United States of America. When has a president ever done anything like that—commandeered the bully pulpit to spread poisonous half-truths and lies? Presidents often lie about this or that particular thing. But no one has ever pressed an obviously bogus case like that. Even the throwaway lines were poisonous lies (“We had transgender for everybody” before he returned to the White House). So it’s unlikely that most Americans are taking it very seriously. Still: He’s the president, he’s backed by a couple hundred lapdogs on Capitol Hill who will repeat and endorse whatever he says, and of course he is reinforced by a propaganda network that reaches millions of Americans every day that will do the same. So the speech still matters, and it may set in train naked attempts to rig the election and prevent some Americans from voting. But having seen the speech, and despite what everyone is saying, and indeed despite what I myself assumed going in, I’m not so sure that the main point here was to lay some kind of groundwork for November. Trump may be the most corrupt and furtive man ever to occupy the presidency, but in this one way he is achingly transparent: His motivations are always right out there. And his motivation last night wasn’t really November. It was just what he said. It was 2020.This man-child with the emotional life of an 11-year-old and an ego that bruises more easily than a three-day-old banana will never stop being obsessed about 2020. In Trump’s mind, Trump can’t lose. It simply can’t happen. (Privately, he has admitted to more than one former aide that he lost, but let’s set that aside for now.) And nothing is ever his fault. Ergo, the election had to be stolen. And he has to “prove” it.A normal person would let this go after a while and start focusing on the future. The broad interpretation that last night’s speech was really about 2026 and 2028 is a function of people making that assumption. But it’s a fatal assumption in this case. Trump is not normal. Trump is possessed. His loss must be vindicated, whatever it takes. It might be vindicated by lies. He will know deep down that they are lies, but he won’t care. For Trump, the world is a jungle—eat or be eaten. It’s an authoritarian worldview, because if that’s what you believe, then any action is justified to avoid being the eaten. But he can’t drop it until the vindication is received.Plenty of dangers lurk for the republic, despite his motivation being mainly retroactive, by the way. The sycophant he wants to install as attorney general, who referred to himself as Trump’s lawyer at his nomination hearing this week, has proven himself more than capable of filing charges against anyone Trump wants him to indict. And the sycophant he wants to install as director of national intelligence, who at his hearing this week couldn’t bring himself to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, will presumably gather intel on anyone Trump tells him to look into. So we have every reason on earth to fear that if Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton are confirmed in their respective positions, they’ll take a torch to the Constitution in an attempt to give Trump his vindication.So picture it. Two and a half more years of sham indictments, destroyed reputations, phony charges repeated by state propagandists who call themselves journalists. And since none of it will work, because the 2020 election was not in fact stolen, it will continue until the day Trump leaves office. Beyond, actually. He’ll be on this jihad until the day that last well-done steak with ketchup arrests whatever’s left of his heart.That’s bad enough. But yes, inevitably, the speech will have ramifications for this November. It’s hard to know right now what they will be. On the one hand, it seems that his cherished SAVE America Act will never become law. So he probably can’t do that.Otherwise, though, saying what he said last night about 2020 tees it up for him to repeat as needed between now and November 3 that he—and Attorney General Blanche and DNI Clayton—have unearthed new evidence that the deep staters are up to their old 2020 tricks. Therefore, they have no choice but to deploy ICE agents to certain polling places. This is clearly against federal law. Blanche had said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March that such a move might be necessary; at his hearing, under questioning from Senator Amy Klobuchar, he said he’d “follow the law,” but his language was slippery.In sum: Trump’s motivation may be retroactive, but for the Republican Party and the right-wing media machine, the speech’s greatest utility is proactive. Either way, we’re left with the grim reality that a steaming pile of lies that nearly everyone knows to be lies could end up exerting a chilling influence over the administration of justice in this country and our electoral process.At the same time, let’s conclude on a more positive note. The reaction to the speech is for the most part encouragingly negative and dismissive. The New York Times, well known for the cowardly equivocation of its homepage headlines regarding such matters, actually used the phrase “outlandish claims” in an early headline. For the Times, that’s a shot of Tabasco sauce. Maybe this speech, combined with those Justice Department goons serving subpoenas to four Times reporters at their homes, will finally convince executive editor Joe Kahn that a newspaper’s job actually is to fight for democracy. The water’s fine, Joe; as Victor Laszlo said to Rick Blaine, it’s never too late to join the fight.   

With Graham Platner out, the battle for Maine's Senate seat just moved behind closed doors.

Donald Trump promised “really big news” in his primetime address on election integrity on Thursday night but failed to deliver any. Instead, he recited a laundry list of disinformation and misinformation but provided no evidence votes were changed or voting systems manipulated in the election he lost six years ago. Election experts called it “shockingly […]

Three people familiar with internal party deliberations told Semafor she indicated as much to the White House on Thursday.

Republicans in Congress are reportedly souring on Vice President JD Vance, feeling abandoned as he’s put media appearances before his duty to help resolve the intraparty strife bogging down the GOP’s agenda.With midterms fast approaching and divisions in the ranks of a thin majority stymieing Republican legislative priorities, many in the party have hoped for Vance to step up, leveraging his position as president of the Senate to be a liaison between Congress and the White House.Instead, “lawmakers can count on a few fingers the times … Vance has set foot in the Capitol,” Kimberley Ann Strassel writes in a reported column for The Wall Street Journal. The vice president has jilted members of Congress for podcasters and talk-show hosts, appearing on programs such as Real Time With Bill Maher and The View, in no small part to promote his new spiritual memoir. Most recently, Vance flaked on a meeting scheduled Tuesday with House Republicans to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience.And remarks Vance has made during his absence have only been salt in Republicans’ wounds. In his public comments, the vice president has been perceived as “bashing his own party to win praise from online influencers” and positioning himself as “scolder of the body over which he constitutionally presides, rather than showing up for the work,” Strassel writes.In his recent media hits, for example, Vance has called those who oppose eliminating the filibuster as “married” to “weird Senate procedural bullshit,” and angered some conservatives by touting an interventionist “Christian” organization of the economy over laissez-faire economics.One GOP senator told Strassel, “As we approach incredibly consequential midterms for this nation and this presidency, Senate Republicans are pretty confused as to why the president of the Senate is actively criticizing the GOP, while also being absent from his Senate duties.”In the past, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has reportedly provided a line of communication between GOP lawmakers and the White House, but she’s now being treated for breast cancer. And while lawmakers reportedly “appreciate” appearances Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have made on Capitol Hill, they have only made Vance’s “lack of interest” all the more clear.