Republicans are shocked, shocked.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito was scheduled to speak with the government’s top cybersecurity official on Wednesday. But the night before, Christopher Krebs was cast out of a job.

“I was going to tell him thank you for a good job” helping to secure the 2020 election, Capito (R-W.Va.) said after checking her schedule to see if the call was still on. “I’m still going to tell him that — just not today.”

President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening fired Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, after he spent days actively debunking the president’s baseless voter fraud claims. And in a rare turn in the Trump era, Senate Republicans across the spectrum — from Trump allies to critics of the president — criticized the decision.

Capito said she was “disappointed” and flummoxed by Trump’s personnel decisions: “I can’t explain it.” Others were more blunt.

Oh come on. Of course she can explain it. Trump is a bad rotten self-dealing crooked lying criminal trying to steal the election. He’s also stupid.

The firing also set off renewed concerns that the president would spend his final weeks in the White House impulsively ousting officials who crossed him and making erratic policy shifts that could not be easily undone.

Ya think??

Krebs’ firing comes amid a purge of senior officials viewed as insufficiently loyal to the president, who is actively preventing President-elect Joe Biden and his transition team from beginning the transfer of power. Defense Secretary Mark Esper was the first to go, and there are broader fears Trump could fire CIA Director Gina Haspel or FBI Director Christopher Wray next. “If it looks like there’s just a flurry of them, it will raise more questions,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) acknowledged.

Oooh yes do raise more questions, and more and more and more and more, while Trump keeps doing whatever he feels like and everything falls apart. It’s very impressive, all this raising of questions.

In the days following the election, Krebs was publicly contradicting Trump’s baseless assertions of rampant voter fraud — both via his personal Twitter feed as well as a website set up by the agency dubbed “Rumor Control.” The platform has confronted head-on some of the most confounding conspiracy theories dominating the Trump legal team’s arguments, including unfounded claims of dead people voting and election machines “switching” votes from Trump to Biden.

“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” Krebs and other officials said in a statement last week on the integrity of the 2020 vote.

So, down came the hammer.