many prominent republicans openly embraced their very worst instincts. from the sitting congresswoman warmly greeeting a white supremacist conference, to the grotesque conspiracy theories after a violent attack against the speaker of the house and her family, the calls from the ex president determinate the united states constitution and overcome his election loss. still here at the table with me -- the sort of notion of extremism in the gop has been, obviously, much covered and much discussed, it's always hard to sort of track the trajectory of it. obviously, the top of that is donald trump. and we didn't get to talk about in the last block his role in the midterm election, which was clearly formidable, and also, i think, for a bunch of reasons -- one is that he's just profoundly unpopular. one of the least popular public figures in american life. but also because i think he's come to represent extremism in a way that's actually quite different from 2016, when polls showed -- voters showed him as more