What if…they had taken a senator hostage?

What if they had kidnapped Vice President Pence?

Think about it.

Then Congress could not have certified President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory.

That would have extended President Trump’s control of the White House — and the military — possibly past Inauguration Day until the radicals relented.

The Trump seditionists wanted just such a coup. And they came close.

This is the dream for the violent white supremacists and Proud Boys who identify Trump as their defender of white, Christian dominance.

At the Capitol they waved Confederate flags and wore T-shirts with anti-Semitic slogans. One man wore a hoodie with the slogan “Camp Auschwitz.”

Their years of talking about lynching liberals led them to hang a noose from wooden gallows they erected on the mall.

Their invitations to violence fit with the profile of the people who made a social media hero out of Kyle Rittenhouse, the then-17-year-old who killed two men during protests over the police shooting of a black man in Kenosha, Wis., last year. Rittenhouse, now 18, pleaded not guilty to all charges at his arraignment last week, claiming self-defense.

John Bolton is a weasel for not telling the truth about President Trump when it might have mattered — at least, theoretically. In practice, however, Bolton’s coming clean wouldn’t have mattered at all, since Bolton’s fellow weasels — Republican senators — were never going to remove the Head Weasel from office. That was always going to be our job.

I’m using the word “weasel” in the dictionary sense of “a deceitful or treacherous person.” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is excepted because he, alone, put duty above party loyalty in voting to convict Trump during his impeachment trial. The rest of the GOP Senate caucus chose to maintain the tragic fiction that Trump is fit to exercise the vast powers of the presidency, even as these cravens know that to be untrue. Imagine how different things might be today if all senators, and not just Democrats and Romney, had upheld the oath they took to judge Trump impartially in his impeachment trial.

Among Republicans, only Romney and Susan Collins of Maine voted — in vain — to hear what Bolton, Trump’s longest-serving national security adviser, had to say. Bolton also could have told his story in the House of Representatives, which formally asked him to testify. And at any time, of course, he could have simply called a news conference and spilled the rotten beans.

New York (AFP) – Donald Trump’s niece is set to publish a no-holds-barred memoir next month that “shines a bright light on the dark history” of the US president’s family, her publisher says.

Mary Trump will release “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” on July 28, according to Simon & Schuster.

It marks the first time that a member of Trump’s family will publish unflattering stories about the former real estate tycoon and reality TV star.

Mary Trump, 55, is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr, the president’s older brother, who died in 1981 at age 42 due to complications from alcoholism.

The 240-page book will detail events she witnessed as a child while spending time at her grandparents’ house in New York’s Queens borough, where her uncle and his four siblings grew up.

“She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse,” Simon & Schuster said in a blurb about the book.

Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, will say that the president, despite being his father’s favorite son, “dismissed and derided him” when he began to suffer from Alzheimer’s.

Don’t think of that number as “big” or “bold.” Just think of it as the appropriate dosage for a once-in-a-century economic affliction.

Author of “America: The Farewell Tour”: We’re heading for a steep decline; Biden and the Democrats have no answers