Donald Trump has long been a pustulant boil on the body politic and it’s getting ready to burst soon. All of the signs are there. The January 6 Committee is subpoenaing yet more records and testimony, Trump’s rampant foolishness with respect to records keeping has been exposed, the feud with Mitch McConnell is escalating, and last but not least, Trump’s minions in Wisconsin are turning that state into a hallmark laughing stock, and ground zero in the MAGA attempt to steal the next election.

Here’s the latest shot over the J6 Committee’s bow.

You see the manic spin, how Trump’s laying it all at Pelosi and McConnell’s feet. At the end he refers to “massive evidence of Voter Fraud” and that is what is worth turning your attention to. He’s on a real rant with that today.

If you go over to Trump shill Liz Harrington’s Twitter feed, it’s filled with this stuff. This is pure Mike Lindell.

This isn’t even one fifth of what’s over there, if you want to go look at it. Now here is why it’s important. Rolling Stone just did an article, on why Wisconsin is the MAGA laboratory for autocracy.

Plus, this fruit fly is running for Governor of Wisconsin.

In Wisconsin, as in other states, the energy in the conservative movement burns hottest among those voters who believe the Republican-controlled Legislature should empower people like Ramthun and throw out Biden’s 2020 victory. Moderate Republicans have responded by ostracizing Ramthun or blasting their party’s descent into a post-fact cult of conspiracy theorists. “A lot of them are stuck between having to follow what is now the party line in Trump’s party and trying to tamp down the most extreme calls for overturning a democratic result,” professor Nolette says.

It’s also created a bizarre, up-is-down environment in which a fringe lawmaker like Ramthun finds himself lauded by Trump, the party’s leader, and at the same time shunned by fellow Republicans in Wisconsin for his crusade to throw out the last presidential vote.

For the first 150 years or so of its existence, Wisconsin earned a reputation as a laboratory of sorts, a testing ground for policies cooked up by liberals and conservatives. Think unemployment insurance and Social Security, school choice and voter-ID laws. Love them, hate them: Thank (or blame) Wisconsin. Deep political divides have always cleaved the state’s politics — this was, after all, the home of progressive icon Fighting Bob La Follette and notorious red-baiter Joe McCarthy, the land of Republican hero Tommy Thompson and LGBTQ pioneer Tammy Baldwin. And for the past two decades, Wisconsinites have grown used to statewide elections decided by razor-thin margins and a perennial battleground-state status. But if not for Florida’s hanging chads in 2000, the entire world might have converged on Wisconsin instead, where Al Gore won by 5,700 votes. Through it all, Wisconsinites saw themselves as a model for clean, open government, a kinder counterpoint to the brutal machine politics of Richard Daley’s Chicago, 90 miles to the south.

For the past decade, however, Wisconsin politics have polarized in much the same way the nation has. Scott Walker’s gubernatorial election in 2010 and his subsequent “divide-and-conquer” assault on labor unions, a surgical gerrymander that has locked in GOP majorities with no end in sight, Wisconsin Republicans, including former Speaker Paul Ryan and former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, steering the party through the Trump presidency — all of it has cemented Wisconsin’s place as a bastion for the Republican Party. If you want to understand where the GOP might be headed, watch Wisconsin.

“Just as conservatives used the state of Kansas a decade ago as the testing ground for the most reactionary fiscal policies they could come up with, Wisconsin is the place that conservatives have chosen to be their testing ground for the most reactionary policies related to democracy and government,” says Jeff Mandell, a progressive lawyer who works on election litigation and who founded Law Forward, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting democracy in Wisconsin. “And it is not an accident.”

And this from Charlie Sykes’ newsletter a couple of days ago.

Via the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

MADISON – A state lawmaker who was disciplined by the Assembly leader over false election claims and who has repeatedly called on his colleagues to take the impossible action of overturning Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election results, appears to be running for governor.

A new campaign website says Rep. Timothy Ramthun, a Republican from Campbellsport, is running on a platform of election scrutiny and is endorsed by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive who has heavily promoted baseless election conspiracy theories.

(Weirdly enough, he pulled the website down within minutes. But he’s still expected to run.)

This, um, complicates things for the Wisconsin GOP.

A Ramthun entry into the race would scramble the Republican primary for governor. Ramthun has been praised publicly and privately by former President Donald Trump for his push to undo the 2020 election result, a legally impossible task.

The crazies are not only alive and well, they are flourishing. Bookmark this piece because unfortunately, you might have to return to it. It looks like this is the direction things are going.

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1 COMMENT

  1. This has got me to wondering if Scott Walker was a prototype, like a political version of computer malware that it’s developers tinkered with until it resulted in Trump.

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