The good news is that there does seem to be some appetite for discussing, in political circles, just how close members of Trump’s inner circle believed Trump came to attempting an overthrow of our constitutional government.

The bad news is that much of this discussion is just Trumpian loyalists expressing fury at officials who took precautions against such moves. Why? Because—say it with me now—Republicanism is a fascist movement that wants to topple democratic government rather than bend itself to tolerate a population that is increasingly more liberal and less oppression-minded than the party’s angry base would prefer.

No Republican is taking steps to prevent a future president from invoking martial law, or using the National Guard to seize control of state ballot boxes, or loosing a violent mob on Congress to threaten lawmakers unwilling to give him a false election “win.” Many Republicans are taking steps to ensure state and national Republican officials would be able to support a future Republican president who makes Trump’s claims or takes Trump’s actions, both more quickly and far more directly.

HuffPost mentions two of these Republicans specifically in a piece mulling the revelation (and its fallout) that Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley summoned military leaders to emphasize the proper chain of command, an action born from fear that Trump would order a nuclear strike in order to provoke a new crisis. This—and that Milley contacted top Chinese military officials to calm fears that our incapacitated leader would launch an attack on their country before Biden’s inauguration—erased Trump’s powers to do so.

To you and me, the news that Trump’s top military official was convinced that Trump was deranged enough to launch a new world war rather than give up power is, yet again, deeply freaking alarming and a sign that no matter how incompetent and unstable we thought Trump was, after his election loss, those around him believed him to be even more dangerous than that.

To Sens. Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and presumably other Republicans still angling for a shot at being the leader of a newly blossomed fascist party, the real outrage is that Milley did a treason when he contacted his Chinese counterpart to reassure him that the United States was not angling for a new war to soothe Trump’s ego.

Or, as Trump boot-polisher Rubio put it, Milley “worked to actively undermine the sitting commander in chief of the United States armed forces and contemplated a treasonous leak of classified information to the Chinese Communist Party in advance of a potential armed conflict with” China.

Uuuuuuuuuuugh. I had forgotten how tedious Rubio had become. This guy would be insufferable as the president of a high school audiovisual club, much less a country.

Anyhoo, seditionist outrage on this one is being met with a particularly hearty set of f–k off messages from the White House. Taking steps to ensure an unhinged, delusional madman cannot launch a nuclear war out of raw spite does not seem like it will harm Milley’s remaining career, at least not during the remaining Biden years. Put Marco Rubio in charge (Note: Never, ever put Marco Rubio in charge) and the situation would probably change considerably.

As for whether Milley was out of line in informing his Chinese counterparts that World War Trump was not, in fact, likely to knock on their doorstep, it’s considerably less clear than Trump’s Republican sedition-backers are claiming it to be. There’s a bit of an internal spat going on with this one, one in which ever-eager Trump enabler and former acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller insisted to Fox News that Milley’s actions were unauthorized and illegal.

But FOX FREAKING NEWS is calling out Miller on this one. According to FOX FREAKING NEWS, contact with China’s Gen. Li Zuocheng had specifically been authorized in October by Defense Secretary Mark Esper in order to diffuse China fears that U.S. military exercises were cover for an upcoming attack, and Christopher Miller knew full well about them:

“Fox News has learned there were about 15 people present for the calls. Sources told Fox News that there were multiple notetakers present, and said the calls were both conducted with full knowledge of then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper and then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller–something Miller denied.”

I’m not calling former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller a liar, but it sure seems to me that FOX FREAKING NEWS is calling former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller a liar. The nuance here that folks are going to hang their hats on is whether the authority to make contact continued on until January when Gen. Milley made the next set of calls, or was automatically scuttled when Miller became acting defense secretary. If Chris Miller didn’t specifically order the calls to stop, and let’s just remember that FOX FREAKING NEWS is calling Miller a liar in all this.

All of this glosses over the broader question of whether Milley’s assurances to Gen. Li Zuocheng in the immediate aftermath of the Trump insurrection at the U.S. Capitol amounted to “undermining” an objectively delusional and dangerous president. It’s difficult to understand how an effort to convince Chinese military leaders that the U.S. was not planning a strike could amount to that unless Trump and his White House were indeed actively planning a strike.

We have not heard so far that this was the case. Gen. Milley was certainly in hair-on-fire mode for a reason, but from what we’ve seen it was out of a sense that Trump might try an unpredictable thing rather than Trump’s team formulating any concrete plans to strike China, in particular, in a Wag-the-Dog attempt to send the nation into a crisis so severe that Biden could be at least temporarily denied office.

Are Rubio and the others suggesting such plans were being made, such that Gen. Milley’s assurances to the contrary amounted to insubordination? Is Christopher Miller suggesting that Milley telling his Chinese counterpart that there were no current plans to launch an attack was an improper undermining of a Trump or Miller effort to suggest, to China, that one might be coming?

By all means, that’s a conversation that ought to happen. Let’s get Miller and Milley in front of Congress post-haste so that Milley can regale us all with the details of why he was worried and Miller can insist that by God the post-election delusional ball o’ twitch had every right to nuke China if he wanted to.

No matter how many new books or news stories come out, there seems to be no end to the new revelations of just how volatile and delusional Trump was, in his last days of office, and just how much effort the rest of government went to in order to keep him from unleashing whatever destruction he could rather than abide his loss. Are we even getting close to the true picture yet, and is there still no sense of urgency in getting there?