...For years — decades even — the conservative elite had alternately tolerated, recruited or activated racists, white nationalists and white supremacists. The elite have their own versions of these biases, but they thought themselves more erudite and tactical, not brash and brazen. They would use surgical tools of voter suppression, states’ rights campaigns and defense of marriage and the unborn to advance their goals in a way they saw as honorable.
But Trump saw the voters that the elites kept under the stairs, the ones they want to excite only around election time. He saw the resentment and rage in them. He saw that their voices had been muted and their tongues chastened.
He drew them out. He let them vent. He allowed them to see they were indeed the majority of the party. He offered to be their leader, their white knight of white power, and they accepted. They grew loud and strong and he fed them red meat. They rampaged and he basked in the glow of the blaze.
Leader and followers had found each other. Now the traditional Republicans were on the run or on the ropes. Rather than become victims of the mob, they yielded to it. They tried to tap into it. They tried to grab the reins of it.
But this mob had only one leader: Trump. It was a cult of personality. It was a religion with one god. And that god is a jealous god. And vindictive. And mean.
Anyone who would dare forsake Trump runs the risk of being smote by him, and targeted by his minions. To diverge from Trump is essentially to abdicate power, and for a career politician that is a fate worse than death...
... The Republicans in Congress are still afraid of their own base, their own constituencies in their own districts and states, because the Trump rot reaches down to the root. Their voters belong to Trump, therefore their futures are in Trump’s hands.
Trump is essentially running a defection minority government from political exile.
Republicans dare not cross him, even if they know that he is wrong, even if they know that what he did to incite the insurgency is wrong, even if they know that voting to convict him is right.
Right and wrong have taken on new meanings in this Republican Party: to be right is to side with Trump, unwaveringly, while the only wrong is to do the opposite.