Though they share a party, Trump himself has no friends. He is a kept man, kept by a band of sycophants and opportunistic hangers on whose loyalties fluctuate with the polls. And, while the ride gets only rougher for congressional Republicans, Trump has no interest in soothing their fears, running interference for them or, god forbid, hobnobbing with them. To Trump, members of congress are no more than the cleaning staff at his hotels.
It all began with the GOP's outreach to their ever-thinning demographic; the scared, stressed, and woefully uninformed white lower middle class voters. That pursuit inevitably led the party to dumb-down it messages, add racist dog-whistle content, to what it is now, the party of fact-free, alternative facts and outright, provable, lies. The GOP's racist, authoritarian, xenophobic, misogynistic pied pipers led the party, not to the moral leadership they talk so much about, but to edge of a dark, nationalistic, fascistic abyss.
And now,with Russia-gate mushrooming to Watergate dimensions, the time has come for them to reap what they've sown; they will achieve a meager harvest of very bad legislation, signed into law by a very bad man who will soon leave office, taking with him the soul the GOP bargained for it all.
As I noted above, Democrats are not blameless. Yet, once the dust settles from all this, voters will have very different and lasting images of both parties. Democrats will go down a hapless bunch of snatchers of defeat from jaws of victory, strategically dumb and stubbornly so.
The GOP will be remembered as the party that tried to gain it all by submitting to the Dark Side.
As for their evil leader, like most of those like him in history, his fate is sealed:
"Till swollen with cunning, of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And, melting, Heavens conspired his overthrow."
Christopher Marlowe , The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus
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