Donald Trump has spent recent months focusing on Jan. 6 rioters to an unsettling degree, offering them praise, support, and vows of future pardons. An Associated Press report in March, for example, noted that the former president has positioned “the violent siege and its failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a cornerstone of his bid to return to the White House.” This coincided with a related Semafor report on the degree to which the Republican has put Jan. 6 rioters “at the heart of his campaign.”......

Last week, for example, President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign released a new ad, narrated by actor Robert De Niro, reminding viewers of Trump’s role in, among other things, instigating the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol. This week, CNN reported that Team Biden has also enlisted three police officers from Jan. 6 to hit the campaign trail in battleground states.

Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, Officer Harry Dunn and Officer Danny Hodges plan to tell voters across key swing states that former President Donald Trump poses a threat to democracy and to their fundamental rights as Americans. Dunn and Gonell sustained injuries during the attack on the Capitol and have since retired from the Capitol Police. Hodges continues to serve with DC’s Metropolitan Police Department.

“We were the victims, we lived through it,” Dunn told CNN. “If I can tell that story a million times, I will. If I can do that, I’ll just be doing my part to save democracy.”

According to CNN’s reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, Gonell, Dunn, and Hodges will “travel to Nevada and Arizona this week and Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Hampshire in the weeks to follow.”.....

The more the public is reminded of Jan. 6, and Trump’s responsibility for the violence, the greater the electoral risks for the presumptive Republican nominee. Indeed, a new dynamic is taking shape: Trump is aligning himself with rioters, while Biden aligns himself with police officers who defended the Capitol.

The latest installment is no exception. The Texas Tribune reported over the holiday weekend on state GOP delegates voting on a platform with all sorts of notable ideas, ranging to demanding Bible classes in public schools to seeking UFO information to calling for U.S. military bases to be named after Confederate leaders who took up arms against the United States.

But The Texas Tribune also highlighted one of the state Republican Party’s newer priorities.

Perhaps the most consequential plank [in the platform] calls for a constitutional amendment to require that candidates for statewide office carry a majority of Texas’ 254 counties to win an election, a model similar to the U.S. electoral college. Under current voting patterns, in which Republicans routinely win in the state’s rural counties, such a requirement would effectively end Democrats’ chances of winning statewide office.

It’s been a few decades since a Democratic candidate won statewide office in Texas, and with that in mind, it’s tempting to think Republican officials would be satisfied with the state’s electoral system as it currently exists......

And that's where this newly proposed county-based requirement would kick in, shifting power away from voters in order to ensure Republican rule. As historian Kevin Kruse explained:

If Texas Republicans embrace this return to a county-unit type of system, they’ll actually have created something even more unequal than the scheme concocted by segregationists of a century ago. Harris County, the home of Houston, has a population of 4.7 million, while Loving County has a total population of 64. Harris County has a sizable black population, while Loving is (as far as I can tell) entirely white. But one vote in Loving would mean more than 70,000 votes in Harris.

Kruse added, “It’s staggeringly unequal, and silencing an ‘urban’ vote that is of course now not just coded as more liberal but racially diverse too. And that, of course, is the point.”

This is, in other words, the latest example of Republicans looking at democracy as something that needs to be rigged, rather than a system that needs to be preserved.

The latest installment is no exception. The Texas Tribune reported over the holiday weekend on state GOP delegates voting on a platform with all sorts of notable ideas, ranging to demanding Bible classes in public schools to seeking UFO information to calling for U.S. military bases to be named after Confederate leaders who took up arms against the United States.

But The Texas Tribune also highlighted one of the state Republican Party’s newer priorities.

Perhaps the most consequential plank [in the platform] calls for a constitutional amendment to require that candidates for statewide office carry a majority of Texas’ 254 counties to win an election, a model similar to the U.S. electoral college. Under current voting patterns, in which Republicans routinely win in the state’s rural counties, such a requirement would effectively end Democrats’ chances of winning statewide office.

It’s been a few decades since a Democratic candidate won statewide office in Texas, and with that in mind, it’s tempting to think Republican officials would be satisfied with the state’s electoral system as it currently exists......

And that's where this newly proposed county-based requirement would kick in, shifting power away from voters in order to ensure Republican rule. As historian Kevin Kruse explained:

If Texas Republicans embrace this return to a county-unit type of system, they’ll actually have created something even more unequal than the scheme concocted by segregationists of a century ago. Harris County, the home of Houston, has a population of 4.7 million, while Loving County has a total population of 64. Harris County has a sizable black population, while Loving is (as far as I can tell) entirely white. But one vote in Loving would mean more than 70,000 votes in Harris.

Kruse added, “It’s staggeringly unequal, and silencing an ‘urban’ vote that is of course now not just coded as more liberal but racially diverse too. And that, of course, is the point.”

This is, in other words, the latest example of Republicans looking at democracy as something that needs to be rigged, rather than a system that needs to be preserved.

Senate Democrats have repeatedly raised concerns about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, though they’ve been reluctant to take meaningful steps to address the controversies surrounding the far-right jurist. That said, in the wake of Alito’s latest controversies, the two top Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee requested a meeting Chief Justice John Roberts to address “the Supreme Court’s ethics crisis.” NBC News reported:

In the letter released Friday, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island asked to meet with Roberts “as soon as possible” and renewed their “call for the Supreme Court to adopt an enforceable code of conduct for justices.” The senators wrote that Alito created “reasonable doubt as to his impartiality” and repeated calls for him to recuse himself in cases related to Trump and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The entirety of the four-page letter from the Democratic senators was posted online.

There’s no great mystery as to what precipitated the outreach. Alito was already one of the nation’s most controversial jurists, but his reputation deteriorated further when The New York Times published this report, noting that in early 2021, between the Jan. 6 attack and Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, an upside-down American flag flew in front of Alito’s home. It was, at the time, a prominent symbol embraced by far-right “Stop the Steal” activists who believed nonsensical conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.....

This, evidently, led Durbin and Whitehouse to conclude that it was time for a chat with the Supreme Court’s chief justice, in the hopes that Roberts will prevent Alito from participating in cases related to the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack.

To date, the chief justice does not appear to have responded. What’s more, it’s not altogether clear what Roberts would — or could — do in response to a situation like this, even if he agreed with the senators.

Nevertheless, Friday’s correspondence suggests key Democratic senators, who appeared rather passive about Alito’s antics, are now eyeing possible next steps. Watch this space.

The list recently grew when the Republican, as part of his hush-money case, lashed out at a variety of people across the legal system, including likely witnesses and the daughter of the presiding judge. Late Friday, as NBC News reported, special counsel Jack Smith requested a brand new gag order against the suspected felon in a different case.

Prosecutors in Donald Trump’s classified documents case in Florida asked a federal judge on Friday to block the former president from making public statements that pose “a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents” investigating and prosecuting the case.

In case anyone needs a refresher, it was nearly a week ago when the former president, referencing the newly unsealed court records, claimed by way of his social media platform that the Justice Department “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE” while executing a court-approved search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. Trump issued an outlandish fundraising appeal soon after, falsely claiming that President Joe Biden was “locked & loaded” and “ready to take me out” during the FBI’s search of his glorified country club......

With this in mind, Smith isn’t looking to silence Trump altogether, so much as the prosecutor’s office wants U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to limit what the Republican can say in this case that might endanger law enforcement officials for no reason.

For his part, the criminal defendant responded to the news with a rather predictable online rant that read in part, “Deranged Jack Smith has asked Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida for a Gag Order on me, so that I cannot talk about all of the Crimes he has committed.”

To the extent that reality still has meaning, (a) there’s no evidence of Smith having committed any crimes; (b) this is an absurd description of the special counsel’s actual filing; (c) Trump could, but won’t, acknowledge that his “locked & loaded” claims were obviously false; and (d) I’ll never fully understand the former president’s strange approach to capitalization.

Nevertheless, the matter will be in Cannon’s hands. If she sides with the defendant — which is to say, if she sides with Trump again — the special counsel’s office will almost certainly take the matter to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has already demonstrated a willingness to reverse Cannon. Watch this space.

QUEENS, NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—In what has become a Memorial Day tradition for him, on Monday Donald J. Trump laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Podiatrist.

Trump made his annual pilgrimage to pay homage to the heroic doctors who issued bogus diagnoses to ensure that their privileged patients never answered the call of duty.

In an emotional tribute, Trump thanked the fallen foot specialists who bravely risked their medical licenses so that others facing military service could be free.

Choking back tears, he said, “They gave everything so people like me could give nothing.”