“Oh,” they cry, “hey gee guess what, it turns out he really is a fascist.”

Of course he really is a fascist. What do you think fascists are? Magic beings with golden horns, and plutonium hair, and the ability to walk on the ceiling? Fascists aren’t special, they’re just fascist. They’re just power-mad and violent and nationalistic and racist and brutal. A dribbling moron like Trump can be one, easily.

On Friday afternoon, 48 hours after the U.S. Capitol was stormed by violent insurrectionists encouraged by Donald Trump in an attempt to overthrow the government in protest of his election loss, a senior member of his administration spoke to me while he was driving to work.

“This is confirmation of so much that everyone has said for years now — things that a lot of us thought were hyperbolic. We’d say, ‘Trump’s not a fascist,’ or ‘He’s not a wannabe dictator.’ Now, it’s like, ‘Well, what do you even say in response to that now?’”

Yes but it’s not just now that it’s like that, it was like that all along. We’ve been saying it all along because it’s true.

All this time, Olivia Nuzzi writes, Trump’s people have been telling themselves it was all worth it to get the reactionary judges and the reduced taxes, but now at the last possible second they realize he actually is as bad as we always said he is.

Granted, his actions on Wednesday were a big step up the Staircase to Evil, but they’re still very recognizably trumpy. They didn’t come out of nowhere.

“I went through Access Hollywood, Charlottesville — all of these insane things. There’s some degree of growing accustomed to the craziness. It’s not like my heart is racing, like, Oh God, how am I supposed to react to this? It’s just more that I’m depressed. For people who devoted years of their lives to dealing with the insanity in an attempt to advance a policy agenda that you believe in, all of that has been wiped out. The legacy of the Trump administration is going to be that the president sparked an insurrection and people died because he tried his best to not abide by the Constitution and the tradition of a peaceful transition of power that’s been the norm since our founding. Nothing else is even going to be a side note.”

Since the “policy agenda” is about making the rich even richer, and the environment even more destroyed, and women even more prisoners of their biology, I have zero sympathy, along with the zero respect for not figuring that out until 12 days before the end. The previous 1413 days didn’t do it, huh?

Trump’s inner circle has contracted amid the self-created chaos and carnage. For this reason, resignations have not had much of an effect on him directly. “He may not even notice,” one adviser said. “People aren’t around to begin with. There aren’t policy meetings with the president and eight or ten people in there anymore.”

So it’s basically all watching tv and just the occasional attempt to overthrow the government?

I tell you what though, they’ve had it with that Mark Meadows guy. It turns out he’s not nice at all.

Advisers have expressed concern and anger over Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, whose actions have been perceived as an effort to secure employment with Trump in his post-presidency, perhaps at the Trump Organization. “Jared has been telling people, ‘Don’t even deal with him anymore,’” one adviser said. “Mark’s responsible for bringing kook after crazy after conniver after Rudy into the West Wing.” (“This is completely false,” Avi Berkowitz, Jared Kushner’s spokesman, said in a tweet responding to this article, “Jared has never said that.”)A former senior White House official said, “Morale plummeted under him, huge mistakes were made — and now he’s scrambling to stick around after. He’s a dishonest asshole who pretends to be this religious Southern gentleman. Fuck that.”

Honey that’s all of them. Look around you. These are not good people. You’re not good people.

“The smart lawyers have gotten to him. It’s all hit him since yesterday: You may have legal exposure from yesterday. You definitely have legal exposure from other things. You have less than two weeks to remain ensconced in here with executive privilege.” 

Duh. Maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea to commit all those crimes in plain sight just before you got yanked out of there.

This adviser, who spoke to Trump on Wednesday amid the siege, said Trump watched the events on television intently. CNN reported that he was so excited by the action, it “freaked out” some staffers around him. The adviser told me that Trump expressed disgust on aesthetic grounds over how “low class” his supporters looked. “He doesn’t like low-class things,” the adviser said, explaining that Trump had a similar reaction over the summer to a video of Brad Parscale, his former campaign manager, shirtless and drinking a beer in his driveway during a mental-health emergency in which police tackled him and seized his weapons. “He kept mentioning, ‘Oh, did you see him in his beer shirt?’ He was annoyed. To him, it’s just low class, in other words.”

Yes that’s the important thing. They weren’t carrying the elegant, expensive, Fifth Avenue guns and tasers and Confederate flags.