You probably know what happens when a bunch of Trumpers walk into a courtroom seeking their twisted idea of justice. Unless a like-minded judge happens to occupy the bench, they get laughed out of court.

Well, it happened again today in a Windsor County courtroom. (Technically it happened in digital space; the hearing was conducted remotely via the Webex meeting app.) The Trumpers entered looking for redress, and wound up flattened under the Big Boulder O’ Justice.

The case involved an ongoing dispute between the leadership of the Windsor County Republican Committee and a band of die-hard Trump backers. This has mostly been reported in the pages of the Vermont Daily Chronicle because political journalism in the mainstream press is pretty much dead in Vermont. (I do wish the VDC would learn how to spell John MacGovern’s name, though.)

Close observers could have foreseen the outcome simply by looking at the forces arrayed on each side. The plaintiffs were represented by Deb Bucknam, a former Republican nominee for attorney general (she got her ass kicked by TJ Donovan in 2016) and a former officer of the state party, who now found herself suing that very institution. She really Perry Masoned the case, assembling at least 13 exhibits of evidence and stretching out the hearing to the point where the judge asked her if she could, you know, get to the point.

The defendants, Windsor County Republican Committee chair John MacGovern and VTGOP chair Paul Dame (and the state party itself), didn’t bother hiring lawyers. They didn’t assemble any evidence. MacGovern even admitted that he hadn’t read some of Bucknam’s exhibits, partly because she hadn’t provided some of them until mere hours before the hearing. In short, neither Dame nor MacGovern took the proceeding very seriously. And by God, they were right. The judge dismissed Bucknam’s case after deliberating for about 10 minutes.

This whole thing is reminiscent of self-destructive Republican battles in other states. In Michigan, for instance, control of the party is in dispute in a swing state during a presidential election year. In Wisconsin, another potential swing state, far-right Republicans appear to be losing their bid to recall Republican State House Speaker Robin Vos. And then there’s the U.S. House, where the Republican majority may evaporate amid a spate of resignations by conventional Republicans who are sick and tired of the antics of the Trump wing — and where the majority struggles endlessly to elect and retain a Speaker, let alone pass any actual legislation.

The stakes are a hell of a lot lower in deeply Democratic Windsor County, where the Republican Party is already pretty much an afterthought. But it’s not pure enough for the Trump wing! They want to get rid of county chair John MacGovern, a very conservative man who isn’t sufficiently obeisant to Donald Trump.

At the county committee’s reorg meeting last October, MacGovern was re-elected chair and Trumper August Murray was elected vice chair. Afterward, the Trump wing seized on a procedural issue with that vote. Both men had been elected on a single ballot, while party rules call for separate votes for each office. They insisted that this was grounds for overturning the election and doing it all over again.

A December county committee meeting descended into chaos, as Trumpers sought to introduce a petition calling for a revote and MacGovern refused to recognize them. He adjourned the meeting and left, as did fellow officers Barre Pinske (best known as a chainsaw artist, who knew) and Suzanne Butterfield, who is also one of Vermont’s two Republican National Committee members. Murray then took over the meeting, and the petition was approved by those remaining.

The upstart contingent held a revote for county committee officers on — wait for it — January 6, unaware of the irony. They elected Trumper Lynn Baldwin as county chair. MacGovern refused to recognize the meeting or the election. At a state party meeting on January 14, the party committee upheld the results of the reorg meeting and affirmed MacGovern’s status as head of the county party.

Afterward, VTGOP officials worked to end the dispute any way they could. In mid-February, MacGovern called a meeting for March 16 where new county committee leaders would be elected. For the Trumpers, this wasn’t enough. They complained that some delegates hadn’t received notice of the meeting. There were dark hints that MacGovern and the party regulars were going to game the vote. (MacGovern denied any skulduggery; if anyone wasn’t notified, he laid it at the feet of an entirely voluntary organization that tends to make mistakes.) At Thursday’s hearing, Bucknam was seeking a preliminary injunction barring the new election.

Ironically, MacGovern wants nothing to do with the whole mess. After nearly a half century as an active Republican, he’s ready to quit. He told the court he would not run for chair and said, in the storied words of Lyndon Johnson, “if elected, I will not serve.” He expressed his disgust with the situation. “I just want a new chair,” he told the court. “I want out of this.”

At the end of the hearing, Judge Dickson Corbett announced his intention to confer with a fellow judge and return “in several minutes.” When he did so, he emphatically rejected the plaintiffs’ case. He noted that “the preliminary injunction is a strong measure” that requires two conditions to be met: First, that clear imminent harm would occur in the absence of a PI; second, that the plaintiffs were very likely to eventually win the full case.

In Corbett’s view, Bucknam met neither standard. He noted that the worst that could happen on Saturday is a continued dispute with competing chairs, and that’s been the situation already for more than two months. The courts, he said, generally steer clear of internal party disputes, which “should be resolved internally if at all possible,” and that the party’s own mechanisms were at work. Corbett then denied the motion for a PI, adjourned the hearing and rose from the bench.

Bucknam tried to get his attention, but the judge either didn’t hear or wasn’t having any. And that was it. The runway is clear for a new county committee election on Saturday, where I’m confident the Trumpers will prevail. They seem to occupy a pretty strong majority of county delegate seats, and MacGovern has made it clear he has no interest in taking part. If this was all a big conspiracy, I have no idea who it was supposed to benefit.

If things go as I think they will, the Trump wing will have taken over another county party, as they have done in several other counties. They’ll likely have bigger, noisier meetings, which they will take as a sign of party growth. They’ll likely assemble a ticket of like-minded candidates for the November election. And all of ’em, or virtually all, will get their asses beat by the Democrats.

Just what an already diminished VTGOP needs: another county captured by extremists, and another loyal Republican walking out the door.