I don't know if I buy all these Republicans secretly hate what Trump is doing
The Republican Party of old has died.
This is the Trump party filled with kooks and deplorables.
They welcome the disinformation and conspiracy theories along with the racism and everything else.
Their pathetic deplorable following do not know how to discern truth from stupid conspiracies. They have someone else to blame for their woes - immigrants
It keeps them where the Republicans want them. Unable to see what's really going on - all the roll back of policy that eventually hurt them in the future, the tax breaks to the wealthy - that does not benefit them, trying to take away their healthcare and on and on.
If the Republicans truly detested Trump, they would join with Democrats to try to take back their party from Trump and perhaps restore some dignity to their party. Sure some members may lose seats but if it means restoring the party then so be it. As far as the Trump base, yeah, they would whine and cry about it but eventually they get over it. What are they gonna do? Vote for democrats? That's never going to happen for the hard core Trump base. If they want to keep things like conservative judges then they will still vote Republican.
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Conservatives were never going to get a crack at finally undoing popular programs like Social Security and Medicare (or as they think of them, "socialism" ) unless they forced the people they considered quislings within their own ranks out of power.
They set up a system that pushed peoples' hot buttons and encouraged them to single-issue vote on them. Compromise was scorned as capitulation, and backsliders were to be punished for their infidelity, long before the term "RINO" was coined. And down went the Rockefeller Republicans and their like.
Once done, they took what they learned and pointed it at the Democrats, ratcheted up the rhetoric year after year after year, and called it "playing hardball."
But the drawback is: When you paint the story that way, it's supposed to end with you bringing the bad guys to justice. They rot in jail, or better yet get hanged or fried. Blow up the Death Star. Drop the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. The Enemy surrenders unconditionally and their symbols get blown up.
Your audience wants this:
But they never get it.
When you tell that story for decades, continually amping it up to keep the audience's blood at a rolling boil, you create an expectation that you can never really deliver on. You can justify decades of investigations and re-investigations and re-re-re-re-re-re-re-investigations, but that's not going turn up anything that will hold up in court. So you put yourself into the position of portraying the other side as unbearably evil and an active threat, and then don't do anything about it. The base still has their hot buttons pushed, still believes every word of it, they just start thinking you're ineffectual at best, or more likely are part of the problem.
