Dispatches From the Fortress – Day 315

There's so much to say about the exit of Trump-Pence and the takeover by Biden-Harris…but as I look at the 'net, I see everyone else saying it.

It's gotta be strange to be a die-hard Trump backer today. They believed in that "mountain of evidence" that he really won the election in a landslide and must find it difficult to process the fact that most of the alleged evidence was never presented to any judge or higher authority and what was presented didn't impress anyone; not even Trump appointees or G.O.P. state officials. If they stormed The Capitol or cheered on those who did, they must see that they didn't rally the Senate to say, "The hell with what voters might have said, give the man four more years!"

If anything, they had the opposite effect and Trump's post-election popularity suffered a lot for it. His exit from Washington, D.C. has made him look worse than anyone he ever derided as a loser. I'd feel sorry for him if I thought he'd ever felt sorry for anyone in his whole life. Even Mitch McConnell, whose one aim in life is Republican Control, thinks that that can be arrived at via — too little, too late — some repudiation of Donald J. Trump.

I do feel a little sorry for Joe Biden, whose "honeymoon" will probably be even less than the week or so they gave Obama. That man has a lot to do. I only caught a little of the inauguration but it sounded like his speech was a good one and there's something hopeful about seeing Kamala Harris on the job. She's certainly not going to be the kind of vice-president whose main job, as someone once said about another one, was to "sit around waiting for a foreign leader to die."

Anyway, I'm not expecting instant results and neither should anyone. For the time being, I'll be happy if they just somehow slow down things getting worse.