More or less everyone in the GOP understood that Trump was completely unfit for the presidency and would represent a possibly mortal peril to the nation if elected. They said as much! Over and over and over.
But for the entire institutional GOP, the electeds, the donors, the lobbyists, staffers and the like, the danger was worth it for three reasons:

1) Holding power is itself an end
2) Judges
3) Tax cuts/deregulation
Trump delivered on all this, and so the bargain worked.

But of course, the worst-case-scenario also came about: a epochal crisis he could not and would not solve. Instead, he has sabotaged efforts to manage the crisis at every turn. It continues as I type this.
Because of Trump's failures (failures that stem from obvious character flaws plainly visible to all back in 2015) we've lost *at least* 100,000 Americans who did not have to die. That's a very conservative estimate. It's almost certainly considerably more than that.
But the awful truth everyone has to recognize right now is that for the institutional GOP, everyone who made their peace with the bargain, *****the bargain has still been worth it.*****
They traded the health & safety & lives of Americans for this. That is the price we've paid for this bargain.

The horrifying truth is: I don't really think there are many regrets on the GOP side.

And I fear that were it to take a hundred thousand more, that'd be worth it too.
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