Hey folks, I’ll be taking a much-needed but short vacation next week. But Standing Room Only will be back in your email boxes the week after, on July 30. In the meantime, catch up on our short video page on Salon’s YouTube channel, where my colleagues and I have funny 1-2 minute takes on politics and pop culture. 

Things are terrible right now, so I want to take moment to savor this small but significant victory: E. Jean Carroll got her money. Not everything she’s owed. She’s only getting her payout, $5 million, from the first case she won against Donald Trump. He still owes her $83 million from the second, but that’s looking more likely to happen now after this huge victory. 

I interviewed Carroll for “Standing Room Only,” and it’s worth watching. She is a delight, who hasn’t let any of this get in the way of her sense of humor. She is also a living reminder that standing up to Trump can work, for those willing to do it. 

It’s frustrating to write about Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearings to be attorney general. Nothing he said can be trusted, of course. Markwayne Mullin spent his entire hearing to be homeland security secretary framing himself as a sober-minded moderate, but of course we’re now seeing the same ICE shootings and other abuses that we saw under Kristi Noem’s leadership of the agency. 

There are a couple of Republicans pretending that they have “concerns” about Blanche, whose nomination is a reward from Trump for doing things like burying the Epstein files and attempting to funnel nearly $2 billion from the Treasury into a slush fund. Blanche knew going in that his job was to give them cover to vote for him, so he said all the right things about following the law and releasing the Epstein files. 

There is zero reason to believe a word of it. Blanche’s conduct as deputy — and now as acting attorney general — reveals him to be utterly void of conscience. He spies a chance to have power and status that he could have never achieved by honest means. Getting it depended on breaking any law or violating any legal ethic to serve Trump’s greed and desire to inflict pain on his political opponents. 

GOP Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina have both suggested they may vote no, but I’m predicting now that they will end up supporting Blanche — and that they intended to from the beginning. Trump ended both their careers in the Senate, so it’s not about fear of him. Turns out Republicans are going along with fascism because they want to. This is a hard pill to swallow, but it’s also hard to deny in the face of this.

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Knowing that Republicans go along with fascism because they want to is crucial to understanding the legacy of Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, whose weird hostage-looking photo confirms he is technically still alive, and the late South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died over the weekend. There’s an eagerness to believe that both men secretly opposed Trump but were hamstrung by their own ambition from doing more to stop him. 

I will leave it to Paul Waldman to explain why this is nonsense. He wrote two excellent articles laying out the various opportunities that Graham and McConnell rejected to resist Trump — or even get rid of him. If they were secretly opposed to the president, they would have ultimately done more to save both their careers and reputations than the reluctant acquiescence projected onto them. 

My book “Troll Nation” came out in 2018, but my thesis needs to be heard now more than ever: Republicans went fascist because they wanted to. After the collapse of George W. Bush’s presidency, it became clear to the right that their ideas were failing and indefensible. So instead of persuasion, they embraced the twin tactics of fascists: lying propaganda and outright force. 

Trump is their leader because he is shameless in his love of both. He gives the rest of the GOP coalition permission to lie boldly and back tactics like turning ICE into a rogue military that kills random people with no consequences. Trump told them they don’t have to win fairly, because they can always cheat. And that is why Republicans got on board, and why it’s also useless to fantasize that their better angels may one day prevail.

Fascists can’t be persuaded or appeased. They have to be defeated.

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