The AG going around the world in an effort to undermine the FBI and intelligence agencies is surreal, but it follows a pattern. The Republican Party has been trying for decades, with quite a bit of success, to undermine faith in government. Run up debt so as to cut entitlements, have corporations write legislation, deregulate industry, install heads of departments whose mission it is to erode those very departments, deny the reality of disproportionate injustice, etc.
Since the likes of Putin also wish to undermine democratic institutions for the purpose of self-enrichment, Putin and Republicans make for interesting bedfellows.
This is a war of ideologies: we vs. me. "It takes a village" vs. "every person for themselves" (cheating permitted...nay, encouraged). Anything that supports the notion of a "collective good" must be destroyed. The likes of Barr, Bannon, Pompeo, Mulvaney et al. are especially dangerous--they're white nationalists, isolationists and despise secularization.
They've seen the writing on the wall (social progression, increased secularism, changing demographics, etc.), so their tactics have become increasingly extreme in recent years (intense voter suppression and gerrymandering, full-throated attacks on science and public education, persistent attacks on the "liberal media" to help shift the Overton Window, stealing a Supreme Court seat and packing the judiciary with right wing ideologues, aligning with dictators who share the goal of undermining democracy for personal enrichment, replacing the dog whistle with a bullhorn, and so on). They take comfort, though, in a tyranny of the minority system which, paradoxically, makes major structural reform nearly impossible to bring about for the very reasons why such reform is so desperately needed.
If this current cast of characters is still in power after 1/20/21, the damage wrought may be irreparable.
Trump didn't happen in a vacuum. He's a symptom of a much larger problem (to which the GOP as a whole is contributing). That said, it's crucial that we remove Trump from office as soon as possible, as he's an especially diseased carrier pigeon for the ideologues who are taking advantage of his narcissistic appeal to the tens of millions of racists, sexists and xenophobes.
I wonder if seeing the big picture (or being helped to see it) would dissuade even a fraction of Trump's soft support (the portion that approves of him but not strongly) from continuing to support him. Are 100% of his supporters really okay with the world Republicans are seeking to realize? If so, they'll regret it. Anyway, I doubt that most people truly grasp what's going on and why.
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