Good morning. 
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 59. Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 4:36 PM for 9h 56m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1867, the Tokugawa shogunate hands power back to the Emperor of Japan, starting the Meiji Restoration.
Michael Kranish writes Mitch McConnell spent decades chasing power. Now he heeds Trump, who mocks him and wants him gone:
While seven GOP senators voted to convict Trump following his impeachment by the House for inciting an insurrection, McConnell supported acquittal, ensuring Trump would face no formal penalty for inciting an insurrection.
Ten months later, Trump is once again dominating the Republican Party, expected to run again in 2024 — and utterly disdainful of the Senate leader who helped save him.Trump dismissed McConnell as a “stupid person” and suggested his favored 2022 Senate candidates should oust McConnell from his leadership post when they get to Washington.
McConnell is not a “real leader” because “he didn’t fight for the presidency,” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post.
….
Just two years ago, seemingly at the pinnacle of his power, McConnell could hardly have foreseen himself in such a precarious position. Midway through Trump’s term, the veteran lawmaker released a new version of his autobiography, which described his rise in the Senate in heroic terms. The book opened with a new glowing foreword penned by Trump, who lavished praise on McConnell as his “ace in the hole” and wrote that he “couldn’t have asked for a better partner.”
Except Trump never actually wrote those words — at least according to the ex-president, who now mocks McConnell’s role in pursuing his agenda. In an interview with The Post, Trump said McConnell actually wrote that foreword and simply used the president’s name on the passage.
Trump said he told McConnell, “Why don’t you write it for me and I’ll put it in, Mitch? Because that’s the way life works.”
McConnell, asked if Trump’s account was accurate, did not dispute it. “I really don’t have anything to add related to him,” McConnell said.
On this last dispute, Trump is undoubtedly right: Trump has never shown any ability to write coherently, and didn’t write even his own supposed autobiography.
This is the effect Trumpism’s rise: other kinds of conservatives, traditional or transactional, amount nearly to nothing within the Republican party. It’s Trumpists and everyone else, where everyone else is a softer term for nobodies.
The same is true in Whitewater, where older varieties of conservatives scamper to win the support, or at least hope they don’t draw the ire, of the populists. See The Kinds of Conservatives in Whitewater.
Highlights From SpaceX’s Water Landing of NASA’s Crew-2 Mission: