The problem is that the media treats Republicans as a distant foreign nation, so to the extent things Republicans say get covered, it’s usually in a detached anthropological sense - “explaining” rather than “criticizing” https://twitter.com/brucepknight/status/1264593065886519298?s=21

The attitude towards Trump isn’t the attitude towards a politician who occupies a role in the same political system as us, it’s more akin to the attitude you might have towards a hated occupying force: abuses are talked about as deplorable but not in any sense petitionable

You might argue that this view is savvy - Trump only cares what Republicans think - but it’s also wrong, because Trump and the GOP can’t function with intraparty support alone. And in the meantime, the idea that Trump SHOULD be held accountable gets lost and forgotten