GOP Leaders Remain Shackled to Donald Trump

Gerard Baker: “The fervent desire of much of the Republican Party’s top brass, its major donors, business leaders who urgently crave a Republican restoration, and many of the party’s most prominent supporters in the media and elsewhere, is for Mr. Trump to break the habits of a lifetime and go quietly away.”

“It is a desire expressed as fervently in private as it is assiduously and dexterously avoided in public. But the big lie of this duplicitous relationship requires them to utter multiple, smaller, cascading fictions.”

“With the exception of a few demented types in Congress and the media, they don’t believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump. They don’t think that the Jan. 6 riot was a legitimate act of protest or the work of federal agents provocateurs. They fear that a Trump-led Republican ticket presents them with a lose-lose proposition in 2024: Either he continues his well-established pattern of losing the party elections—the 2018 midterms, the 2020 general election, the 2021 Georgia senate runoffs—or he wins and condemns them to another, potentially even more chaotic four years of his distinctive leadership.”