[finnbow]

A reasonably healthy party might give its indicted leader some benefit of the doubt, while calling for judgment to be withheld before he has his day in court. But Republicans correctly understand that their party will consider Trump an innocent martyr regardless. The sickness of the Republican Party as it is presently constituted is that there is no conceivable set of facts that would permit it to acknowledge Trump’s guilt.

What has brought the party to this point is the convergence of its decades-long descent into paranoia with its idiosyncratic embrace of a career criminal.

Without belaboring the point, consider each of these dynamics in turn. The Republican Party’s internal culture has been shaped by what Richard Hofstadter famously described as “the paranoid style” in American politics. Hofstadter specifically attributed this description to the conservative movement, which, at the time, was a marginalized faction on the far right but has since completely taken control of the party and imposed its warped mentality on half of America. To its adherents, every incremental expansion of the welfare state is incipient communism, each new expansion of social liberalism the final death blow to family and church. Lurking behind these endless defeats, they discern a vast plot by shadowy elites.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023...his-guilt.html

This article describes Whell to a T.