...devoid of ethics and common decency Republicans, with virtually no exceptions, have become. And how desperate they are.
The Republican Party has been trying for decades, with quite a bit of success, to undermine faith in government. Run up debt so as to cut entitlements, have corporations write legislation, deregulate industry, install heads of departments whose mission it is to erode those very departments, deny the stark realities of disproportionate injustice, etc.
Since the likes of Putin also wish to undermine democratic institutions for the purpose of self-enrichment, Putin and Republicans make for interesting bedfellows.
This is a war of ideologies: we vs. me. "It takes a village" vs. "every person for themselves" (cheating permitted...nay, encouraged). Anything that supports the notion of a collective must be destroyed. The likes of Barr, Bannon, Pompeo et al. are especially dangerous--they're white nationalists, isolationists and despise secularization.
And, again, they're desperate. They've seen the writing on the wall (social progression, increased secularism, changing demographics, etc.), so their tactics have become increasingly extreme in recent years (intense voter suppression and gerrymandering, full-throated attacks on science and public education, persistent attacks on the "liberal media" to help shift the Overton Window, stealing a Supreme Court seat and packing the judiciary with right wing ideologues, aligning with dictators who share the goal of undermining democracy for personal enrichment, replacing the dog whistle with a bullhorn, and so on). They take comfort, though, in a tyranny of the minority system which, paradoxically, makes major structural reform nearly impossible to bring about for the very reasons why such reform is so desperately needed.
Lastly, desperate people take desperate measures. Nobody with Trump's numbers (such as an abysmal "strongly approve" number in the 20s with a "strongly disapprove" number that's almost twice as high) can win re-election without extensive fraud (foreign interference, voter suppression, etc.), even with the electoral college in place. And Trump knows that remaining in office may be the only thing that'll keep him out of prison.
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