IF you call your troops to battle, you better damned well lead them and be prepared to go all the way. You cannot scream “Charge” and then scamper in and watch it on television, only to have your troops learn that you lied to them. They will neither trust nor respect you ever again.

Apparently, the irredeemable Proud Boys do know when they’ve been conned. They know better than anyone because they believed Trump led them as his troops. They are calling Trump out for what he has always been while using the word Trump hates the most, “weak.”

But by this week, the group’s attitude toward Trump had changed. “Trump will go down as a total failure,” the Proud Boys said in the same Telegram channel Monday.

As Trump departed the White House on Wednesday, the Proud Boys, once among his staunchest supporters, have also started leaving his side. In dozens of conversations on social media sites like Gab and Telegram, members of the group have begun calling Trump a “shill” and “extraordinarily weak,” according to messages reviewed by The New York Times. They have also urged supporters to stop attending rallies and protests held for Trump or the Republican Party.

The Proud Boys are not synonymous with the MAGAs. And most Trump supporters knew damned well that he lost the election and were not really expecting Trump to overturn it. Most certainly didn’t support the insurrection at the Capitol. So this isn’t a groundswell. This is from the people that believed Trump was prepared to overthrow the government.

Trump wasn’t prepared to overthrow the government. He may have wanted a coup. But no one gets to initiate a real coup or overthrow any sitting government unless they’re willing to die for it or face whatever consequences result from failure. Trump wasn’t willing to go that far, not even close. He was willing to send the Proud Boys in to do it and hope for the best from a safe distance and with a lot of self-proclaimed deniability.

In that sense alone, the Proud Boys are exactly right. Trump is weak. He called his boys into battle and then abandoned the troops, didn’t follow-up on his promises, and when none of it worked, he went and hid. Trump cried louder about getting shoved off Twitter than he did about the coup failure.

We have said repeatedly that the MAGAs aren’t going anywhere. We worry that their demands will only get increasingly extreme. But some of the most dangerous members of the fringe-right have figured out that they’ve been conned. It doesn’t make them any less dangerous, the opposite, perhaps.

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak