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Welcome to our new VIP feature for Hot Air as well as a members-only show in the Hughniverse! Duane Patterson and I now are doing a Week in Review show for Friday evenings, exclusive to members in both platforms. Duane has been the Generalissimo behind the Hugh Hewitt Show for more than two decades, and we have partnered on weekly commentary since 2007.

Where do we go from here on the Trump indictment? “You can hold multiple thoughts on this,” Duane says, “and there’s multiple layers of this. … What’s happening to him in New York is an absolute star chamber, a show trial. It’s really bad, it’s why it’s so important, and why [Trump] needs to be robustly defended. That said,” Duane continues, “the remedy to this is not … that all the other Republicans should just clear out of the race.”

Trump needs to earn the nomination as a separate effort, Duane argues, and says that his Mar-a-Lago speech raises significant questions about it. “The first ten minutes, he actually behaved himself,” Duane notes, talking about “our movement, they’re coming after all of us. He was doing the royal we,” Duane notes. “The second ten minutes turned into Festivus,” making the campaign all about Trump … again, especially in terms of the “swamp” — and that raises even tougher questions for Trump as to why he didn’t do more about it in his term as president.

We also discuss:

• On the need to fight Bragg: “It’s bigger than Trump,” Duane says. I agree: “It has to be fought,” I reply. We cannot tolerate secret charges in an indictment,” and still maintain the rule of law. On that point, I tie it to what we saw at Stanford Law, and how that matters.
• Ron DeSantis’ “swamp” strategy: “He’s going after the people that Trump appointed or left in power,” I point out, rather than frontally attacking Trump himself — for now.
• When is an insurrection not an insurrection? When Democrats do it. Trans activists and gun-control activists stormed the Tennessee legislature last week, led by three Democrat legislators. Republicans in the chamber expelled two of the three from their offices, which media paints as an affront to democracy. “If Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobert had stuck around on the House floor and championed the protesters,” I ask, how long do you think it would have taken Nancy Pelosi to expel them?” “An hour,” Duane replies.
• Duane and I discuss the Colorado Springs story about police preventing a mass school shooting by a transgender teen and what that means for a potential tipping point in the trans movement. “This is going to come to a head this year,” because this is another thing in American society that’s unsustainable,” Duane predicts. “It hasn’t hit critical mass yet, but it’s going to.”
• Women are already shaming corporate entities for allowing men to erase them, especially in sports. British Olympian Sharon Davies has called for a boycott against Nike for using Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesperson for female athletes. We discuss that, the narcissistic totalitarian impulse behind preferred-pronoun enforcement, and whether women may rethink their political orientation based on one party’s endorsement of those who want to annihilate their legitimate biological entity. That may well depend on who’s leading the other party, as Duane and I discuss.

Be sure to watch it all, and join the conversation in the comments!