He knows his sycophants

I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.

“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.

“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”

Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.

[...]

House Speaker Paul Ryan vowed to me that he would “protect conservatism from being disfigured.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the radio host Hugh Hewitt that “Trump is not going to change the institution,” referring to the GOP. “He’s not going to change the basic philosophy of the party.”

In retrospect, this was hilarious.

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In a sense, the entire Republican Party has become an accessory.

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Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020 had seemed certain to weaken Trump’s grip on the Republican Party, if not end his political career. No relevant precedent existed for any one-term president to become his party’s default front-runner in the next election. Especially not an extremely unpopular one-term president who lost by 7 million votes, refused to concede, incited a lethal insurrection in an attempt to overturn the result, was impeached for a second time, defied long-honored tradition by skipping the swearing-in of his successor, left behind a traumatized nation (with 25,000 National Guard troops defending the capital against his own supporters), became the first former president to be indicted … and the rest of the whole loser litany.

Yet the speed with which Trump has settled back into easy dominance of his party has been both remarkable and entirely foreseeable—foreseen, in fact, by Trump himself.

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“That Republican Party, frankly, no longer exists,” Donald Trump Jr. gloated on Newsmax the day of the RNC staff purges [and the emplacement of Lara Trump as chair]. “The moves that happened today—that’s the final blow. People have to understand that … the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party.”

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As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis observed in January: “You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring, he’ll say you’re wonderful.”

In 2022, J. D. Vance proved himself a master. Although the Senate candidate from Ohio had previously dismissed Trump as “noxious,” “reprehensible,” and “cultural heroin,” among other things, he worked to convince Trump that he was reformed. Trump may or may not have believed him, but he very much relished the grovel of it.

“J.D. is kissing my ass. He wants my support so bad!” Trump bragged at a campaign stop with Vance in Youngstown in 2022. He also claimed that Vance had fallen “in love” with him. If anything, this is the fun part for Trump: showing off that he has snapped up another politician like a distressed condo asset. He had made another Republican candidate—a rich Ivy League ex-Marine, no less—self-emasculate on his behalf.

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Trump’s movement had in fact drawn his followers together as a self-reinforcing herd. They were joined in contempt for a unified enemies list—defined loosely as liberal elites. They also shared the buoyant faith that supporting Trump would be a panacea. “Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore,” Trump reassured a gathering of Christian conservatives this past July.

“What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain,” as Vance wrote in this magazine in 2016. He was a fierce critic of Trump before he became a Republican Senate candidate who saw an obvious path to the front of the herd.

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The party that allegedly reveres the Constitution is going all in on someone who has called for its termination. A party that cherishes freedom is willing to cede authority to a candidate who says he would be a dictator on his first day in office. A party that supposedly venerates law and order is re-upping with an actual felon. A party whose rank and file overwhelmingly wants Russia to defeat Ukraine believes that Biden stole the 2020 election, and that Trump’s legal shambles are entirely a Democratic plot.

  The Atlantic

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.