Mo Brooks is thrilled to remind you that he was an integral part of the Jan. 6 insurrection

Alabama Republican congressman and Senate hopeful Mo Brooks is not what you’d call a “smart man.” There was the time he quoted Hitler on the House floor, or the other time he tweeted his email password to 100,000 of his closest friends, or the other other time he said that climate change is all due to rocks getting wet. We’re not exactly talking about a world-class mind at work here, people.

And yet, even if Brooks possessed the most brilliant intellect on the planet, he still would be left reeling from the fickle finger of fate, which this week stuck itself directly in his beady eye via an ill-timed ad touting his integral role in the Jan. 6 insurrection and undying allegiance to former President Donald Trump — who, it just so happens, is smack dab in the middle of trying to shove Brooks off the MAGA train ahead of the Alabama Senate election.

First the ad, shared by Brooks’s personal “Endorsed By President Trump” Twitter account on Thursday morning:

The ad, aimed at drawing a distinction between himself (seditious, very stupid) and GOP Senate primary opponent Katie Britt (generic, not quite as shouty) is basically one long, extremely loud reminder that Brooks was one of the key speakers at the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the march to, and attack on, the United States Capitol building.

“On Jan. 6, I proudly stood with President Trump in the fight against voter fraud,” a comparatively low-energy Brooks intones to the camera, after rolling footage of himself screaming about “weakling, cowering, wimpy Republicans.”

This would be embarrassing as it is, although not unprecedented in the “capitalizing on sedition” conservative grifter space. But it is rendered all the more so considering that at almost the exact moment the obsequious ad debuted, the Washington Examiner published an interview with Trump himself, who went out of his way to muse about retracting his initial endorsement for Brooks’s Senate run.

“Mo Brooks is disappointing,” Trump said, citing Brooks’s call more than seven months ago for conservatives to move past the 2020 loss and look ahead to 2024. “I’m determining right now, has Mo Brooks ... has he changed?”

“If it meant what he sounded like, I would have no problem changing [my endorsement] because when you endorse somebody, you endorse somebody based on principle,” Trump continued. “If he changed that principle, I would have no problem doing that.”

Here, then, we have the inevitably pathetic trajectory of just about every attempt by Republican sycophants to latch themselves onto Trump’s ego-fueled rocket — the telegraphed retraction of favor, and the candidate’s ensuing attempt to grovel his way back into the former president’s good graces. It is, as Trump is so often prone to saying in his frequent retellings of Aesop’s “scorpion and frog” fable, simply his “nature.”

Still, as far as Brooks’s campaign ads go, this one pales in comparison to his 2017 spot, which featured actual audio from a mass shooting.