excerpt., a reminder of the recent "destroy the GOP" movement:

[....] Another group styling itself America First showed up last weekend at the “Stop the steal” rally for Trump in Washington. Its leader, the podcaster Nick Fuentes, who has been banned from YouTube, was a baby-faced veteran of the 2017 white supremacist torch-lit rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This time he led the crowd in enthusiastic chants of “Destroy the GOP”.

“We’re done making promises,” he said. “It has to happen now. We’re going to destroy the GOP.” The march was also attended by the far-right armed group the Proud Boys, still revelling in Trump’s televised request to it to “stand back and stand by” as the election approached.

Roger Stone, the flamboyant self-described “dirty trickster” and former 2016 campaign aide who was granted clemency by Trump for witness tampering, has become a fixture at these rallies.

At a similar flag-waving protest in Miami last weekend, marchers turned on the Florida senator Marco Rubio, a potential 2024 presidential contender, for not turning up. “Where’s Marco?”, they chanted, despite his carefully calibrated obsequiousness towards Trump.

Stone used his account on Parler — the social media site of choice for those banned from Twitter — to threaten Rubio. “Where is Marco, indeed?” he asked. “A growing number of Florida Republicans are urging me to challenge Marco Rubio in the Republican primary.” He later backed down, saying he was “friendly” with Rubio, though he did not sound very amicable.

It has become a hallmark of Trumpists to snarl at their opponents and then claim they did not mean it or it was a joke. The uncertainty unleashed by this trolling has led many Republican politicians either to join the “Make America great again” crowd or live in fear of the consequences. Trump supporters have the firepower to mount primary challenges that can kill their political careers stone dead, leaving them in a state of nervous apprehension [....]