Although Joe Biden has called-out T-Rump by name before (albeit just, “this guy“), he went hard and heavy against the orange-turded asshole today in a press conference in Belgium, while also sticking GQPers-feet to the collective fire:

President Biden calls Trump a phony populist and calls out Senate Republicans for pushing this fake populism when they know better. pic.twitter.com/Wqd1wJAJHX

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) June 14, 2021

Story via the Guardian‘s live blog this afternoon:

In a wide-ranging press conference in Brussels, Joe Biden did something he often skirts around. He criticized Donald Trump by name in public.
The 46th US president sometimes likes to refer obliquely to Trump, the Trump administration and his politics, but not always explicitly and not always addressing the 45th president directly.

Following the NATO summit, Biden weighed in on Trump’s style and the Republican party’s apparent blind loyalty to their former president, despite his resounding defeat and numerous humiliations (twice impeached, eg).

Biden said: “It is a shock and a surprise that what’s happened in terms of the consequences of President’s Trump’s phony populism has happened.
“And it is disappointing that so many of my Republican colleagues in the Senate, who I know know better, have been reluctant to take on, for example, an investigation [into the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol by rapid supporters of Trump], because they are worried about being primaried.

“But at the end of the day we have been through periods like this in American history before where there has been this reluctance to take a chance on your reelection because of the nature of your party’s politics at the moment.
“I think this is passing, I don’t mean easily passing, but that’s why it’s important that I succeed in my agenda, whether it’s dealing with the vaccine, the economy, infrastructure, it’s important that we demonstrate we can make progress … and I think we are going to be able to do that.”

Further from The New York Times, later this afternoon:

“The Republican Party is vastly diminished in numbers,” Mr. Biden said.
“The leadership of the Republican Party is fractured and the Trump wing of the party is the bulk of the party, but it makes up a significant minority of the American people.”

American officials in the past have typically made a point of leaving domestic politics behind when traveling abroad. But the outdated saying that politics stops at the water’s edge was blown to shred by Mr. Trump, who often used foreign trips to rail against his political enemies at home.
Mr. Biden’s comments about the opposing party were tame, by comparison, but still marked an unusual breach of norms by a president intent on restoring them at home and abroad.

Mr. Biden’s optimism about the future of the Republican party is not shared by many in his party, who have publicly expressed fear that Republicans are increasingly in thrall to Mr. Trump, making them unwilling to take part in the give-and-take of governing in Washington.

And officials throughout Europe have said they are still braced for a return of Trumpism if Republicans take over the Congress in 2022 or if someone like Mr. Trump — or Mr. Trump himself — wins the White House again in 2024.
That fear makes some political leaders around the world nervous about whether America’s long-term commitments can be sustained.

Mr. Biden said he did not worry about that.

“I’m not making any promises to anyone that I don’t believe are overwhelmingly likely to be kept,” he insisted.

Despite Biden’s words, the real motion of action will have to happen with him and his AG Merrick Garland, who so far have shown not to be on the cutting-edge of efforts to bring the horrid, criminal, corrupt workings of the T-Rump’s four years in office to true accountability and subsequent punishment. The only course of action with the horrors made by T-Rump/Billy Barr/Mike Pompeo/Jeff Sessions — the list is near-endless — is to hard-charge the facts and get these shitheels to publicly testify on charges of everything.
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate this morning had a most-excellent look at just that — a must-read piece in its entirety, including this couple of notable gems:

In other words, nothing that is meant to be over is actually over. Because nothing was ever really litigated in the first instance.
Despite the best efforts of Robert Mueller, two impeachment trials, myriad court cases, House oversight, and a decisive election, we can all see that the worst excesses of the Trump years were pleaded, argued, sometimes proved, and then dismissed.
The difference between papering over and closing a case could not be more apparent than it is now. There has been no real reckoning with the broken laws and shattered norms of the Trump presidency, nor with the ostensibly conclusive results of the 2020 election, and certainly not with the violent insurrection of Jan. 6.
As Will Saletan observed last week, none of these theoretically discrete phenomena are dead or buried; they are instead not merely informing many people’s present but also rapidly distorting the future:
…
Pretending Trump was a crazy dream and it’s all normal again is now a bipartisan sport. As David Graham warned last week, the only thing more dangerous than the claims that “this is not normal” that pervaded the Trump years is the thin veneer of “normalcy” that characterizes the present illiberal moment.
But what is most bizarre, troubling, and painful about this current attempt to move forward and revert to normal without properly reckoning with what has happened is that the message is emanating from the Biden Justice Department and White House.
They are now the folks arguing that everything that happened over the course of the Trump years was an aberration and a one-off, and that the best response to all of that is to ignore, ignore, ignore.

If that’s the case we be fucked.
Even worse — Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, in an interview published this morning at Salon on T-Rump’s ongoing-unhinged behavior and how he gets away with it (another must-read the whole thing, thingie), plus this sharp insight:

“If there is someone who is ranting and raving about things that are obviously and demonstrably false yet insists that they are true, that is by definition delusional. If Trump were not a former president, he would be easily seen to be psychotic. Because he is a former president and has a cult following, we are expected to wonder if his behavior can be explained some other way.”

T-Rump looks like an all-night-long ranter and raver:

Lol, fight fight fight ? https://t.co/9XnqCZWd6C

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) June 14, 2021

We’re way-not out of the woods yet…