It’s primary season, and, so far, 91 of the 95 candidates who’ve been endorsed by Donald Trump have either won their primary or moved on to a voting runoff. We mention this because it’s an indication that Trump is still very popular among Republican voters and still highly influential in Republican Party politics.

And because the Democrats are hell-bent on keeping him from running again in 2024.

That’s the whole point of their “Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol,” which yesterday treated us to Act Two. Think about it: Gas is more than $5 per gallon, baby formula is in scarce supply, grocery prices are at record highs, crime is running rampant, our southern border is wide open, and foreign leaders don’t even show up when our current president calls a summit. Does anyone in their right mind think Joe Biden would beat Donald Trump in a rematch? How about Kamala Harris, who actually polls worse against Trump than Biden? Or how about Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor and current transportation secretary whose “leadership” credentials consist of the poorly managed small town of South Bend, Indiana, and our disastrously managed supply chains?

As we noted last week, Nancy Pelosi’s “Select” Committee is indeed a purely partisan affair without a single real Republican on the committee. No wonder hardly anyone has been watching. (Although, to be fair, CBS did pull in roughly 600,000 fewer viewers for its primetime J6 coverage than it did for a “Young Sheldon” rerun on the prior Thursday night.)

This J6 diversion isn’t helping Biden’s polling, either. On the day of the first episode, he was at his lowest point in the RealClearPolitics average, with 39.5% approval and 54.8% disapproval. And by Monday night, he’d dug himself even deeper: 38.9% approval and 54.6% disapproval.

It serves him right. This sham is a prosecution in which the defense doesn’t get to present its case, call any witnesses, or even cross-examine the witnesses called by the prosecution. It’s a disgrace, an embarrassment to our nation, and a sad reminder of the old Moscow trials of 1936-38 in which Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, in an attempt to consolidate his power, charged his political opponents with sedition and hauled them before a rigged court before sentencing them to death. As columnist Tristan Justice writes:

Members conducting the show trial accused their opponents of conspiracy to topple the U.S. government, just as the Soviets accused Old Bolshevik leaders of plans to terminate Stalin. Never mind that American institutions held on January 6, and the federal government came nowhere close to collapse when congressional proceedings were interrupted.

The trials in Moscow culminated in the “Great Purge” of dissidents to the incumbent regime, with defendants given death sentences. The January 6 proceedings are aimed at the ultimate purge of former President Donald Trump and his supporters, albeit through societal exile and jail sentences as opposed to execution. According to whistleblowers in the FBI, a purge within the federal law enforcement agency has already begun.

The biggest takeaways from yesterday’s performance were the one-sided committee’s lazy decree that Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud were untrue and that former Trump attorney and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was apparently drunk on Election Night and told Trump he should declare victory while it looked like he was cruising to a landslide victory.

As to the Trump-deranged Democrats’ errant claim that Trump incited the January 6 riot, not even MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow believes that rubbish anymore: “Yes,” she says, “there was a pro-Trump rally, at which the president spoke, and we can absolutely talk about all the things the president said there. But the idea that that rally is the thing that got out of hand and that somehow resulted in the breaching of the Capitol — that rally was very far from the Capitol, and the people who … did the initial breach that allowed everybody else to come in, they never went to that rally.”

No, the real point of this exercise was to keep Trump from running again, which his former campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, actually got Bill Maher to say out loud on his Friday night show.

Here, at least, Republicans and Democrats can agree. Even Donald Trump agrees, and he noted as much in an exhaustive and deeply sourced 12-page prebuttal to the would-be Torquemadas of the J6 show trial:

This is merely an attempt to stop a man that is leading in every poll, against both Republicans and Democrats by wide margins, from running again for the Presidency. The reason I am leading in the polls is because Democrats have caused record inflation, sky high gas prices, energy dependence on our adversaries, the education system is in crisis, illegal aliens are invading our border, the supply chain has crippled our way of life, parents can’t get baby formula, mandates have crippled businesses, and our way of life has been crushed by government regulations. The United States is being destroyed. The Democrats know that I would correct all of this, and they are doing everything in their power to stop me — but we can’t be stopped. We have to Save America.

Will these Trump-addled Democrats succeed in their Ahabian quest to keep The Orange Man off the ballot in 2024? It’s too early to tell. But they’re running out of opportunities, and, in the meantime, the country is going to hell on their watch.