THE NEW YORK TIMES INVENTS A GOP CRISIS SO IT CAN CREDIT TRUMP WITH ENDING IT

Lead story at the New York Times website right now:

For eight chaotic years, Republicans battled in public and private, fighting over Donald J. Trump’s polarizing personality, his divisive policies and his history of electoral defeats through lawsuits and leadership battles, felony convictions and suburban defections.

Yet even before a single balloon has dropped at their national convention this week, Republicans have united — seemingly without reservation — behind the man and his message.

Republicans have been fighting one another over Trump for eight years? Seriously?

Lisa Lerer and Rebecca Davis O’Brien, the authors of this piece, aren't the only people writing for the Times today who think there are divisions within the GOP. In a naive Times op-ed, Chris Christie asks whether Trump can "meet the moment" with a message of unity and healing. Christie is skeptical, which is to his credit, but one way he expresses that skepticism is by criticizing Trump choice of J.D. Vance as a running mate, a pick that "doubles down on the portion of the party already completely devoted to him rather than reaches out to the broader party and beyond."

But there is no "broader party." I know Christie kept telling us during the runup to the Republican primaries that he was going to get Trump into a debate and flatten him with the mighty power of his rhetoric, after which the party's voters would break free of Trump's spell. But he never got the chance, he had no Plan B, and even if Trump had deigned to debate him, he just would have called Christie fat and doubled his lead over him in the polls.

Of the current completely predictable moment of unity, Lerer and O'Brien write:

It is a party-wide evolution that would have been difficult to envision ... as recently as this spring, when the party was recovering from a bruising primary contest and the serial humiliations of a dysfunctional House majority that struggled to select its own leadership. Then, Mr. Trump was a liability and not the party’s great unifier.

But it wasn't a bruising primary contest. The party's top bruiser, Donald Trump, didn't even debate. Then he won contest after contest effortlessly. Sure, a segment of the primary electorate voted against him, but as I noted during the primaries, many of those anti-Trump primary voters were people who didn't vote for Trump in the 2020 general election. And while there may have been leadership battles in the House, no anti-Trump wing ever emerged.

There is no such wing. The anti-Trumpers have been purged. Whatever disagreements Republicans have, they have been united for years on two things: the belief that Democrats and liberals are an existential threat to all that is good and decent, and the willingness to rally around Trump.

Lerer and O'Brien write:

Speaker after speaker on Tuesday bent their knees, offering tribute to a man who had once insulted them, belittled them and, eventually, defeated them.

This is one of the oldest rituals in Trumpdom. The Lindsey Graham-ing of onetime doubters is now so routine, and so reliably successful, that Trump felt safe picking a former apostate as his running mate. Trump knows he can turn every GOP critics into either an exile or a supplicant for life.

We're frequently told that many Republicans secretly despise Trump. But they're Republicans, not Democrats, so they won't lower their odds of winning by fighting with one another during a campaign. Even the ones who don't have a bone-deep loyalty to Trump have a strong loyalty to their own party. Democrats could learn something from them.