Trump is exactly the same person he was when he campaigned in 2016.

In hindsight, what I find most shocking is how the GOP is not only defending everything he does, but fighting tooth and nail to protect him no matter how blatantly criminal his actions have been. https://twitter.com/mdnij34/status/1246824359488098305

Trump famously said that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters.

And Clinton said that a subset of Trump supporters could be described as a “Basket of Deplorables”.

Not only were both of these statements correct, they were saying the exact same thing.

Four years ago, I suspected a lot of lifelong Republicans saw the choices available to them, grumbled “Well, at least he’s not Hillary”, and reluctantly pulled the lever for Trump.

And then we all saw what happened next.

Whatever madness came down the pike - Trump’s wildly inappropriate behavior, his increasingly obvious ties to Putin, his screaming unfitness for office - was all normalized by Fox News, Breitbart, et. al, reassuring Republicans that they were all lies propagated by the MSM.

But “FAKE NEWS!” was never more than a short-term dodge.

It gives the GOP time to weather the storm until the public gets used to whatever shocking allegation is leveled at Trump.

So once the evidence is undeniable... everyone’s used to it. Trump suffers zero consequences.

FFS, the Trump Presidency should have ended when the transcripts of his son’s meeting with Kremlin lawyers were released.

Or when the “quid pro quo” with Ukraine came to light.

It’s not that we didn’t have evidence. The Republicans just refused to do a damn thing about it.

So it took about 3 months for Trump to be transformed from “Lesser of Two Evils” into “Unassailable God-King Whose Wisdom Must Not Be Questioned”.

This is how Trump has viewed himself from Day One.

But it remains astonishing how many Republicans are willing to accommodate him.