THE REPUBLICAN CULT OF WHATEVER YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH

In The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein writes:

The sweeping attacks from Republican elected officials against former President Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts last week send a clear signal that if he wins a second term, he will face even less internal resistance from the GOP than he did during his first four years in the White House.

Well, yeah, obviously.

Republican pushback was rare enough in his first term, against even Trump’s most extreme ideas and actions, but it did exist in pockets of Congress and among appointees inside his own administration with roots in the party’s prior traditions. The willingness now of so many House and Senate Republicans, across the GOP’s ideological spectrum, to unreservedly echo Trump’s denunciation of his conviction shows that the flickers of independence that flashed during his first term have been virtually extinguished as he approaches a possible second term.

Brownstein, like most observers, believes this is happening because Trump is a strongman who's intimidated the rest of his party:

The strong message of the near-universal Republican condemnation of the verdict is that “Donald Trump owns the Republican Party,” the political scientist Susan Stokes, who directs the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, told me. “That means he can pretty much force the rest of the party leadership, if they see their future in the party, to toe the line, no matter what.”

I don't see it that way. I don't think Republicans feel forced into accepting and endorsing Trumpist behavior -- not anymore.

In Trump's first presidential run and his term, Republicans weren't sure the system would tolerate his constant attacks on rules and norms. But he won the Electoral College in 2016 and came within approximately 40,000 votes of doing the same in 2020. He encouraged insurrection on January 6, 2021, yet he's leading in the polls now.

Republicans don't care about democracy or the rule of law. What they care about is being in control of the government all the time. They didn't think you could stress-test the system the way Trump has and get away with it, but now that they know you can, they're all for Trump's approach. They want permanent, irreversible control of the entire system, the way they have permanent control of the federal courts and permanent control of many red-state and purple-state legislatures. They want to be able to nullify Democratic rule everywhere, the way Ron DeSantis's handpicked Florida Supreme Court justices have allowed him to nullify the election of a Democratic state attorney in Orange and Osceola counties.

They're not Trump cultists. They want all the power, and they think the force of Trump's personality -- along with hundreds of Trump judges on the federal bench, with hundreds more potentially to come -- can help them get it. So of course they're on board with everything Trump is doing.

If Democrats can find a way to scare politically disengaged swing voters with the details of Trump's plans, this embrace of Trump might not work. But that's going to be difficult when most voters care about nothing other than their own economic struggles. In any case, the GOP isn't ride-or-die with Trump reluctantly. He seems as if he might get away with it, and they're cool with that.