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Nice little party you have here…

Be a shame if anything happened to it.

Greg Sargent upacks the meaning of that weird statement. It was probably just Trump being an idiot … but there is a method to his madness even if it was unintentional:

Donald Trump called in to a rally for Virginia Republicans late Wednesday night, joining a festival of derangement featuring former adviser Stephen K. Bannon hallucinating aloud that Trumpism will rule the United States for the next century. The former president declared Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin “a great gentleman.”

Yet that came only hours after Trump issued a splenetic statement about fellow Republicans, fuming that if they don’t “solve” the invented problem of a stolen 2020 election, “Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24.”

How to reconcile Trump’s renewed endorsement of Youngkin with his tacit threat to punish Republicans for failing to reverse his election loss by urging his voters to stay home? Here’s how: In Trump’s eyes, Youngkin’s relentless pandering to Trump’s lies about 2020 has, for now anyway, passed his litmus test.

Which captures something essential about the post-Trump GOP: Republicans recognize that continuing to pander to those lies may be absolutely essential to keeping Republican voters engaged without Trump on the ballot doing it instead.

Trump’s statement has been analyzed as either the latest projectile vomiting to issue from his disordered mind or as a genuine political problem for Republicans. But few have paused to ask whether it might actually be true that energy among GOP voters turns on keeping alive the idea that the 2020 outcome was dubious or illegitimate, and what that might mean.

The Virginia contest is testing this premise. Youngkin has employed all sorts of oily and disingenuous tricks to pander to voters in thrall to Trump’s 2020 lies about our election system, while pretending not to.

For instance, one of Youngkin’s most devoted campaign trail surrogates is a Virginia lawmaker who has spun crackpot conspiracy theories about Democrats rigging the system against Trump, while alleging a plot to steal the election from Youngkin himself.

Youngkin has said the 2020 outcome was legitimate, while going to great lengths to send the opposite message from the other side of his mouth. He vows to restore “election integrity” and is demanding an “audit” of voting machines — both coded ways to humor Trumpian mythology that our election system renders rigged outcomes, and that Trump voters are the victims of it.

Youngkin recently refused to say whether he’d have voted as a member of Congress to count the rightful 2020 electors, before backtracking. That’s suddenly germane again: At Bannon’s rally, attendees pledged allegiance to a flag that was present at the Jan. 6 insurrection.

So Trump endorsed Youngkin at a rally where the insurrection continued to be treated as a glorious last stand of sorts that has been invested with near-messianic significance.

The most charitable interpretation of all this is that Youngkin is actively encouraging and seeking to harness this type of energy, while strategically paying lip service to the idea that 2020’s outcome was legitimate.

The straddle is obvious: Going too far down the Trumpian rabbit hole might complicate peeling off the educated and suburban voters a Republican needs to win in Virginia, voters Youngkin is appealing to with his businessman-turned-politican routine as well. But feeding Trumpian pathologies to whatever degree he can get away with is essential to keeping Trump base voters engaged.

That latter notion helps explain a key aspect of the continuing GOP enthrallment to Trump’s 2020 pathologies — the refusal of some GOP leaders to state unequivocally that he lost; the sham “audits” in numerous states; the trend in GOP candidates running on an openly declared vow to subvert future losses; and the relentless whitewashing of Jan. 6.

Here’s a little clip of the rally in Virginia last night in which they brought in a flag used on January 6th to say the Pledge of Allegiance. No word on whether it was soaked in policemen’s blood:

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