There has been a Trump-shaped hole in the Republican soul for as long as I can remember. And, more importantly, this vicious darkness at the center of the party has been plainly evident all along to anyone whose job didn't rely on pretending it wasn't there.
Party elites tried to fill that with Bushes and Romneys and McCains, but what the meatheads have always wanted was Rush Limbaugh with the nuclear codes.
Trump's rise was an extended "Yes, and..." exercise between him and the Republican base. Regurgitating back to them the lexicon of bigotry, grievance, rage and paranoia in which they had already been soaking for decades. A vocabulary of arrogant ignorance and hate which the Republican party absolutely relied on to win elections, but were always careful to keep at arm's length for the sake of the sensibilities of the Sunday Shows and the New York Times editorial board.
Fire 'em up for elections and stuff 'em back into the basement after.
But Trump was willing to close the distance between candidate and the language of Hate Radio to zero. He loudly amplified the bits that brought the meatheads to their feet, and quietly dialed down the bits that weren't crowd-pleasers. In this way he acoustically measured the size and shape of the Republican soul, and won their fealty by feeding them a steady diet of whatever they most wanted to hear.
Which is why, once the GOP turned to Gingrich-style slash-and-burn politics and Limbaugh-style speech and no one objected strongly enough to smash that poisoned chalice and run its practitioners out of the party, the road to a monster like Trump was made straight. And now that the base has finally, finally gotten a pure, uncut taste of what it's wanted all along, injected every day directly into the pleasure center of their brains, there is no coming back from this.
And once Trump is gone, that Trump-shaped hole in the Republican soul will remain. Except that's not quite right. By now that Trump-shaped hole has become the entire party, and once Trump is no more, once the base weeps and rages and rampages over it, inventing one wild conspiracy after another about how their Dear Leader was stolen from them by the Deep State and the Radical Commie Left and, I dunno, Greenland, they will emerge furiously dope-sick for someone -- anyone -- who promised to feed their addiction.
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