Fox's midterm engagement strategy is telling its viewers that Democrats are coming to kill them https://t.co/vdZD8Nu6xX

As usual, the network's commentators are taking cues from Trump, who argued Saturday that Democrats were "an angry left-wing mob" that is "too extreme and too dangerous to govern.

Tomi Lahren said this morning that "The average citizen, if you're on the right, should be concerned and in danger.” Sebastian Gorka chimed in that Democrats had “normalized violence in America.”

Sean Hannity says the choice for voters is between "mob rule or law and order." Laura Ingraham says its "Mob rule or the rule of law? Perpetual rage or real results?" Tucker Carlson compared Democrats to the Hutus before the Rwandan genocide.

We're well past the already-risible claim that Democrats were the "party of crime," unwilling to protect voters from danger. Now, the argument from Trump and his propagandists is that the Democrats *are* the danger.

“Unity” cannot mean that Democrats agree not to hold anyone responsible for what happened last week and over the last four years and Republicans agree to keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing.

I mean it can and Republicans would certainly prefer that it did, but that path just brings us right back here.

Pretty cynical effort by Trumpists to turn criticism of Trump and other Republican leaders whose lies incited the crowd into an attack on all 75 million who voted for him.

Good plan for avoiding accountability; bad plan for avoiding more violence from their supporters.

In my head I've been breaking down the people involved with Wednesday's events into sevenish groups. Each group had a different level of engagement, perhaps understood what was happening differently, and requires a different level of social and legal sanction.

1. Protesters

They were lied to, they came, they protested, they never got near the Capitol, they left.

Protected First Amendment activity, they shouldn't feel proud that they participated but not much to be done here.

If Republican leaders are actually interested in "unity" rather than using its rhetoric to avoid accountability, here's something they could do. It doesn't involve much in the way of consequences, but it does feature truth-telling, apologies and requests for reconciliation.

To be clear, I don't think any of this would actually happen, but it would be nice (if insufficient) if it did.

Ronna McDaniel, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley could issue a joint statement and do a press conference in which they acknowledged that Joe Biden is president-elect and that he won a free and fair election by a sizable margin.

They could say that there is no evidence of meaningful election fraud and that judges, including ones appointed by Trump, have rejected much of what the president and his allies have been complaining about.

They could apologize for misleading their supporters over the past months and say that they understand why Democrats may think their claims fueled last week's violence and are horrified if that is the case.