I see that Gym Jordan will be Minority House Leader in the new Congress. That’ll be a mess.

And I take it the House is going to vote on whether to move forward on impeaching Pete Hegseth this afternoon. Passing the resolution requires a simple majority, which is not impossible. I understand that if Tom Massie’s articles of impeachment are somehow tabled or blocked by Speaker Mike Johnson, they can be transferred over to the next session of Congress. Which might actually work out better.

Update: The House voted to send the articles back to committee, which I understand stops them for now. But I beliueve they can be ressurected in the next Congress.

But speaking of impeachments — last night Rachel Maddow made a case for impeaching A.G. Todd Blanche.

I confess that Blanche is a puzzle to me. With the other bozos on the cabinet you can kind of see their motivation. Hegseth appears to be living out his boyhood fantasies of being a Mighty Warrior Man. RFK the Lesser has his weird anti-science ideology he gets to push. Scott Bessent at Treasury wants to make the world safe for rich white men. Etc. But Blanche had a successful career as a partner in a major law firm, specializing in defending white collar crime. Other than the glory of the title of Attorney General, I’m not sure what his deal is now. He’s likely burning his future law career to the ground as Trump’s Attorney General. He’s only 52, so one assumes he had planned to be working for a whle longer.

I’m assuming Blanche is a reasonably bright guy in order to have achieved big deal law partner status. I have a hard time believing anyone bright enough to tie his own shoes would actually feel intense personal admiration and loyalty to Donald Trump, even though Blanche puts on a good act. Maybe it’s just about money, and Blanche is somehow in on the grift-a-palooza that is the Trump Administration. Otherwise I just plain don’t get Blanche.

In other news — Chuck Schumer appears to have challengers for the title of Senate Majority Leader, although none have declared themselves to be contenders officially. Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is getting mentioned a lot.

Best read I’ve seen today: The Trolls’ Comeuppance by Adam Serwer at The Atlantic. In brief, Serwer argues that the Righ, insulated in his own media bubble, developed a culture that was all about trolling. And the troll culture is all about posting more and more outrageous content to get “engagement” — lots of attention and shares. They didn’t realize they weren’t  influencing those who were engaged. They’d just turned themselves into a freak show. Serwer writes:

If you were spending hours on X, you might have believed that most Americans were delighted by cruel memes celebrating deportations, or that affordability issues were a “hoax,” as President Trump kept insisting, or that a “red wave” was inevitable.

And later

This is one reason the Trump administration is such a mess: To Trump, everyone’s job is to create content their audience will like, not to consider the wisest or best policy. This is why you have Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posting workout videos while mismanaging a war and encouraging measles outbreaks. This administration is less about achieving tangible policy goals than about creating the perception that those goals have been achieved and the libs owned through content designed for the more morally depraved audiences on X, or for the validation-obsessed president himself.

I don’t see any more comebacks for Trump. And it occurs to me that the choice of Gym Jordan as House Minority Leaders amounts to doubling down on troll culture. They aren’t learning.