As fate would have it, this is the last post I’ll ever write for Hot Air. Others are in the queue and will publish later tonight and tomorrow but they’re already written. The stars have aligned to make a presidential speech on Trump’s threat to democracy the last topic I have to tackle.

They’ve aligned for Biden too.

Marc Thiessen is indignant today that the White House would abuse the tradition of a primetime speech, normally reserved for matters of state, to deliver “a blatantly political campaign speech attacking the Republican Party.” I understand that indignation. My guess is that the speech will do him no good electorally and potentially some harm by calling to mind Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark from 2016. There’s a reason coaches typically don’t insult the opposing team before the big game, knowing how they’ll use that insult as motivation. There’s also no question that Biden has political motives in giving this address, hoping to shift the midterms from a referendum on his presidency to an implicit choice between him and Trump. He did okay with that sort of election two years ago.

If he’s really lucky, a bunch of Republican candidates will get indignant on Trump’s behalf in the morning and ride to his defense, making their own races more of a choice than a referendum as well.

I assume Thiessen is correct when he says this sort of speech in this sort of format is unprecedented. What I would gently say in reply is that it’s also unprecedented for a once and future president to go around saying that people who attacked the U.S. Capitol not only shouldn’t be in prison, they’re actually owed an apology from the government. He’s the same character who’s been screeching this week that fairness requires that he be reinstated as president immediately. And the same character who’s working tirelessly to keep his fans enraged at the federal government for what was clearly a warranted search of his property, never mind that he’s well aware from January 6 and from the flood of threats being made towards his antagonists that someone could get hurt because of it.

That’s what I mean when I say that the stars have aligned for Biden. He’s giving this speech, which will skirt the subject of “semi-fascism,” at a moment when Trump has never seemed more “semi-fascist.” Some of his apologists — who routinely call Democrats Marxists and communists, by the way — were furious that Biden would use such an inflammatory term to describe Trump and his disciples. Let me ask them: Would they agree that term applies to Trump himself, at least? If the boot fits, wear it?

If it does, maybe Biden’s not wrong to believe that fact warrants some special public attention, whatever his ancillary and cynical electoral motives might be.

Kevin Williamson had a fine post today at NRO responding to the sort of partisan who insists that good Republicans must continue to mindlessly pull the lever for this party led by a semi-fascist who, by the way, is lavishly worshipped in public by nearly every Republican on a ballot anywhere this year. Maybe it’s time to consider that a party won’t change course unless it knows it will lose votes by failing to do so, in which case the “better an autocrat than a Democrat” contingent is giving the GOP carte blanche to be as rotten as it likes.

“But the other guys are worse!” used to be a pretty persuasive argument, until the Republicans tried to stage a coup d’état and nine-tenths of the conservative commentariat decided to try to justify that or explain it away in the hopes of selling one more doggie-vitamin advertisement. Donald Trump is out there right now calling for himself to be installed as president through some unconstitutional means. And Republicans act like he’s either the Second Coming of George Washington or, at worst, the wacky sitcom neighbor of U.S. politics…

Regarding socialism, I once observed that either there’s something inherently wrong or it’s just the unluckiest ideology in history, one that just happens to keep producing tyrants and monsters. I find it difficult to look at the Republican Party in 2022 and not ask the same question. Does it just happen to end up hand-in-glove with Q-Anon kookery — with every quack, charlatan, cretin, crackpot, tiki-torch Nazi, and Brideshead-cosplaying dork across the fruited plain — or is there something profoundly wrong with this organization, its animating spirit, and its people?…

How many clowns do you have to see getting out of the clown car before you realize you’re at the circus?

What’s the limiting principle on “better an autocrat than a Democrat”? Here’s where the hardcore partisans can assure me that there *is* some red line that Trump or the party could cross where one’s vote would need to be withheld to send the message that the autocrats must be gone if the GOP is ever to win an election again. Clearly it wasn’t January 6. So where’s that line? At what point does the dutiful pledge of total unaccountability for the great and glorious party and its leader no longer bind? Because if there isn’t one, and it sure seems like there isn’t, we’re headed for something a little more robust than “semi-fascism.”

The show starts at 8 p.m. ET.