One nasty feature of Republicans is always playing ‘the victim card‘ no matter the circumstances: ‘After the attempted coup, the mood in the pro-Trump world became one of profoundest self-pity.‘
And that’s the GQP fall-back stance on everything — they’re the casualty in all the toss-and-tumble of politics.

Bullshit. The victim here is America, and the horror-center is the voting booth. According to the Brennan Center for Justice early last month: ‘As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states. That’s 108 more than the 253 restrictive bills tallied as of February 19, 2021 —  a 43-percent increase in little more than a month.’
A fast-continuance of The Big Lie.

Despite being in the minority, Republicans has fucked-up America’s political system — this dung-hill of lies, delusional reality and hatred of all things non-white from one of only two political parties is creating a stop-gap in a functioning routine to even fight a murderous pandemic, much less in rebuilding our infrastructure or handling other issues facing this country.
The problem is our political structure is way-askew in favor of the GQP (h/t tweet Susie):

For a variety of reasons—some long-standing, some intentional, others newer or incidental—the political institutions that make up the field of U.S. politics are increasingly stacked in favor of one side: the Republican Party. @FiveThirtyEight explores: https://t.co/94FWRUAlPN

— ABC News (@ABC) May 2, 2021

An assessment of the shitty circumstances from FiveThirtyEight last Friday:

For a variety of reasons — some long-standing, some intentional, others newer or incidental — the political institutions that make up the field of American politics are increasingly stacked in favor of one side: the Republican Party.

Take the Senate. Republicans currently hold half of the seats in that chamber even though they represent just 43 percent of the U.S. And it’s not just the Senate — the Electoral College, the House of Representatives and state legislatures are all tilted in favor of the GOP.
As a result, it’s possible for Republicans to wield levers of government without winning a plurality of the vote. More than possible, in fact — it’s already happened, over and over and over again.

Minority rule has always been possible in the U.S., as we saw during the Jim Crow era, when white people manipulated elections and obstructed Congress in order to suppress the rights of a Black majority in many Southern states.
The founders purposely designed many of our federal institutions to only indirectly reflect the will of the people — in political science lingo, they made them “counter-majoritarian.”

And for most of our nation’s history those minority protections helped both parties in roughly equal measure.
In other words, to revisit our tennis game analogy, the two players regularly switched sides of the court, but now, that isn’t the case.
…
It may seem dramatic to suggest that Republicans are overriding democracy to win power when Democrats currently control all three elected legs of the federal government: the presidency, Senate and House. But in order to secure them, Democrats had to go above and beyond winning a simple majority of votes, like a tennis player having to ace all of her serves on a particularly windy day.

By now, Democrats’ disadvantage in the Electoral College is well-documented. President Joe Biden won the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points, yet he won Wisconsin — the state that gave him his decisive 270th electoral vote — by only 0.6 points.
In other words, Biden needed to beat former President Donald Trump nationally by more than 3.8 points in order to win the White House outright. (However, Trump wouldn’t have won outright unless Biden had won the popular vote by fewer than 3.2 points, thus losing Pennsylvania as well. The Electoral College’s Republican bias in 2020 thus averaged out to 3.5 points — but either way, it’s the most out of sync the Electoral College has been with the popular vote since 1948.)

And it gets worse:

In fact, Republican senators have not represented a majority of the population since 1999 — yet, from 2003 to 2007 and again from 2015 to 2021, Republicans had a majority of members of the Senate itself.
That means that, for 10 years, Republican senators were passing bills — and not passing others — on behalf of a minority of Americans.

This has implications for policy as well as democracy.
“You have a Senate that empowers small states,” Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, said.
“Plus [with] the filibuster, you have to get compromises to get to 60 votes.”
For example, Grumbach pointed out, fossil-fuel-producing states such as Kentucky, Louisiana and West Virginia don’t have very many people, yet their six senators are capable of blocking legislation to address climate change even though most Americans say the federal government is not doing enough on the issue.
…
Unlike the Electoral College and Senate, the founders actually did intend for the House to represent the majority of people — yet the chamber now shares the others’ Republican bias.
One reason for this is, again, urban-rural sorting; the clustering of Democratic votes in urban areas has made it harder to draw maps that benefit Democrats rather than Republicans.
But another reason is engineered by Republicans themselves. The GOP has taken full advantage of its many opportunities to draw boundaries that give them an unfair advantage.
For instance, after the red wave election of 2010, Republicans drew more than five times as many congressional districts as Democrats, and they used it to push their structural advantage in the House to record levels.
…
State legislatures are the last piece in the institutional jenga. Here, too, urban-rural sorting and gerrymandering have handed Republicans an advantage: Republicans currently control at least four state-legislative chambers (the Michigan Senate, Michigan House, Minnesota Senate and Pennsylvania Senate) for which Democrats won the statewide popular vote in the last election.

And the kicker:

“You have a party that believes at a high level in democracy, and you’ve got a party filled with a number of people who wield power who don’t,” Hakeem Jefferson, a FiveThirtyEight contributor and a professor of political science at Stanford University, told us.
“I think it’s uncomfortable for scholars to say outwardly, because it doesn’t seem like the objective thing to say, but it is empirically the truth.”

This is just a small sampling of the piece — go read the entire thing, it’s lengthy, but worth your while, however how shitty the storyline.
Terrible lying as liars:

Oh, hush, my dear, it’s been a difficult year
And terrors don’t prey on
Innocent victims
Trust me, darling, trust me darling
It’s been a loveless year
I’m a man of three fears
Integrity, faith and
Crocodile tears
Trust me, darling, trust me, darling

(Image by illustrator and portrait painter, Tim O’Brien, and can be found here).