Heather Cox Richardson

So that's another part of what we're seeing here, I think, is just his determination to prove he's a big guy and he's strong.

Well, I don't think it's hard for us to cover it.

I think the piece that is worth talking about in this moment is that the Republican Party really owns him at this point.

And one of the things that has always protected him was the fact that the Republican Party was unwilling to toss overboard his potential voters.

And so they were keeping him on board so that they could get those voters or they were true believers.

We do have true mega believers in Congress.

But in this moment, we have mechanisms for getting rid of the president that are not going to happen, I don't think, under the 25th Amendment, for example.

But the role of Congress is to make sure we do not have a madman in the presidency.

And they're abdicating that right now.

And that is an indictment of the Republicans in Congress, as they should have been indicted from the beginning for letting him go on his first impeachment in 2019, 2020, and so on.

But

Right now, when I look at what we're seeing, the real pressure point for me is those Republicans in Congress.

You only needed a handful of them to say, hey, this is not okay.

You know, maybe we were willing to look the other way when he tore up USAID, or maybe we were willing to look the other way so that we would get the extension of the tax cuts.

But when you are looking at somebody who is not only tearing up the post-World War II domestic order,

but is also tearing up the rules-based international order that has been in place since at least World War II, bringing us back to the same kinds of conditions that led not only to World War II, but to World War I. One would think that

that at least some Republicans would be open to the suggestion that this must stop.

And the trick is we have laws on the books that simply have to be enforced.

We have mechanisms on the books that simply have to be enforced.

So this is not saying, hey, you gotta go do something radical.