Jonathan Chait: “Maybe the Senate caucus really will draw the line somewhere—perhaps at Gaetz, perhaps at one or both of Gabbard and Hegseth. But there is something disconcertingly familiar in the confident yet carefully hedged assertions that the old-line GOP will stop this madness. It is exactly what Republicans said would stop Trump from receiving the nomination in 2015, from winning the presidency in 2016, and from reclaiming the party’s leadership after the ignominy of January 6. ‘I don’t think he’s a serious candidate,’ Senator Lisa Murkowski said yesterday, of Gaetz. That is almost a verbatim repetition of what elected Republicans once said about Trump.”
“At every step along the way, Republican elites have assumed that they could stop Trump later. But when the decisive moment arrived, they discovered that the cost of confrontation had gotten higher, not lower. Opening a breach with a man whom the base had come to admire, and then worship, would imperil their own ambitions, not just Trump’s.”
