Georgia Republican Debacle: Everything Trump Touches Dies

The instant analyses of the stunning Democratic victories in Georgia and the civil war in the Republican Party have begun.

Here's Axios' fairly vanilla take on Mango Mussolini's suicide cult:

• The party has now lost the House, Senate and White House on his watch.
• He leaves Democrats in full control of Washington's agenda, with only the Supreme Court's conservative majority as a counterweight.
• As a curtain call for Trumpism, approximately a dozen senators and 100+ House Republicans today will publicly support an idea that many of them think is idiotic and doomed to fail, as they protest congressional certification of President-elect Biden's victory.

  What Senate control means for Dems and Joe Biden:

• They can try to do big spending and tax hikes via budget reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority.
• They can jam through nominees and judicial picks if they stay united.
• They control what comes to the floor and when. [snip]

  A big winner: Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost her 2018 race for Georgia governor, galvanized Black voters and became the face of yesterday's massive Democratic turnout.

  The big loser: Top Republicans blame Trump for sabotaging what should have been two easy wins — turning off suburban voters with his chaos and craziness, and sowing distrust of the Peach State election machinery with base voters.

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo says, even if the filibuster remains in place (thanks, conservaDem Sen. Joe Manchin!), Democratic control of the Senate opens the door to many more possibilities:

... President-elect Joe Biden will have legislative opportunities he did not have hours earlier. He will have months to beat back the coronavirus pandemic; alleviate its economic impact on Americans; improve health care; strengthen voting rights; raise the minimum wage; lead criminal justice reforms; roll back the worst of Trump’s economic, environmental and foreign policy damage; and more. It’s exhausting just typing it up.

Its the kind of exhaustion we like!

The Washington Post's Karen Tumulty tells Republicans that the Georgia results should make them finally realize something:

It is time for Republicans to face an uncomfortable but increasingly obvious truth.

President Trump is just not that into you.

He never has been.

To Trump, the party of Lincoln was a rental vehicle, one that he took for a joyride and is getting ready to turn back in, with trash jammed under the seats and stains covering the upholstery. Also, the tank is empty, and there’s a crack in the windshield.

Democrat Raphael Warnock has won his Senate race in Georgia, defeating Republican Kelly Loeffler, a billionaire who had reinvented herself as a Trumpist, right down to the trucker cap that she started wearing atop her expensively styled blond locks.

If Democrat Jon Ossoff’s lead over David Perdue, whose Senate term expired Sunday, holds up in the remaining Georgia Senate race, Republicans will have managed to lose the presidency, the House and the Senate during Trump’s four years in office.

Quite the trifecta.

Greg Sargent has an important reminder not to let Republicans rewrite the history of this time:

The bloodletting has begun.

With Democrats close to recapturing the Senate, Republicans allied with Mitch McConnell are raging at President Trump for his role in this debacle. In their spin, the Senate Majority Leader and other Republicans piously wanted their two Georgia senators to run on issues and the economy, but Trump dragged them into a cesspool of conspiracy theories and personal grievances, costing them the suburbs.

Don’t let Republicans get away with this massive rewrite of recent history. At stake here is not just getting the story of these elections right, but also whether we will hold the right people accountable for the disastrous assault on our democracy Republicans waged for the last two months, the future damage of which could prove substantial.  [snip]

... In reality, McConnell and his team did all they could to harness the very same conspiratorial and deeply destructive impulses among GOP voters that Trump was feeding, and even went as far as they thought possible in feeding those impulses themselves.

Let’s not forget that McConnell and many other Senate Republicans spent weeks refusing to say publicly that Trump had lost the election. They did this for purely instrumental purposes: Because maintaining the deception that Trump’s hopes were still alive might keep his voters energized in the runoffs.

That Moscow Mitch McConnell (arguably having caused more damage to American democracy and the general welfare in recent years than the incompetent Mango Mussolini) will soon be in the minority and in a diminished role in the Senate, thanks to his doomed, cynical partnership with Mango Mussolini, is perhaps the ultimate example of the expression coined by Never Trumper Rick Wilson, "Everything Trump touches dies."

This is a death worth rejoicing.