Donald Trump will never accept losing anything – whether an election or a bet. But that wouldn't matter if he didn't convince millions of Americans to make his grievances their own.

This Ball of Thread unwinds what made the pincer attack that overran the Capitol on January 6th possible. Donald Trump's grievance narratives gave disaffected Americans meaning, and in that meaning, he convinced thousands of people to throw their lives away in his name. The thing is, it's all the same con. That con defeated the Russia investigation and weaponized the Department of Justice against his opponent. And when he lost in 2020, he unleashed it to unite fringe right-wing groups and mainstream Republicans in a shared revenge fantasy. Thus, he was able to raise a ragtag army to sack the nation's Capitol briefly, and in the process, savagely battered hundreds of police officers and ended America's tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

Though the attack ultimately failed by only delaying the certification of Joe Biden's victory, the bets Trump and many of his biggest fans made on January 6, 2021 are now paying off in ways that were inconceivable on January 6, 2025.

Stephen Miller has had two notable failures in 2025. His initial success at deporting 200 mostly innocent men to a concentration camp has been backfiring ever since. And his demand that DHS attempt to snatch 3,000 people a day has led to backlash without making the US safe from dangerous immigrants. These failures must become part of making Stephen Miller the villain of Trump's failures in 2026.

Read the post: https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/12/27/we-dont-know-how-when-stephen-miller-fails/

Watch this: https://youtu.be/-j2JfEzuqY8?si=_nt2eC5T5fjb93ry

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Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair she didn't really know how bad the Epstein scandal would be, and so relied on her resident conspiracy theorists -- Dan Bongino, Kash Patel, and JD Vance -- instead. But she's still misjudging who cares about this.

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