Seth Masket: “The folks who run the party now are the populist grassroots outside DC. They decide who gets nominated for office and who doesn’t. They don’t see this as a temporary madness; they see this as the movement that put them in charge and actually cares about the things they care about. They don’t see any need to ‘snap out of it’; that concept doesn’t make sense to them.”
“Indeed, calling for them to snap out of it is essentially asking them to give power back to the previous faction that never took them seriously in the first place. Why would they want to do that? They’re in charge, and as far as they’re concerned they’re winning.”
“So no, they’re not going to abandon the guy who put them in power. Not even if he’s convicted, not even if he’s in prison. And yes, that means the country has a potentially awful election year coming up, in which the nation’s official institutions have deemed one party’s leader guilty and sentenced him and the nearly half the country considers those institutions illegitimate. It is a toxic, tragic, and potentially violent cocktail.”
