Ronald Brownstein writes:

The Republican response to Donald Trump’s latest criminal indictment offers a clear test of the famous saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again and hoping for a different result.

The choice by Republican leaders, and even almost all of his 2024 rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, to unreservedly defend Trump after he was indicted earlier this year by the Manhattan district attorney helped the former president to widen his lead in primary polls. The roar of outrage from Republican leaders to that indictment restored Trump’s grip on the party after frustration over his role in the GOP’s disappointing 2022 midterm elections had loosened it.

But since last week’s disclosure that Trump faces another criminal indictment – this one federal, over his handling of highly classified documents – the party leadership and 2024 field has almost entirely replicated that deferential approach.

Repeating the pattern from other moments of maximum threat to Trump, the GOP response has been marked by a pronounced communications imbalance. From House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, Trump’s supporters have loudly supported his claims that he is being persecuted by the left.

Simultaneously, with only a few conspicuous exceptions like second-tier presidential contenders Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, the most Trump’s critics in the party have been willing to do is remain silent and not validate his vitriolic charges. Apart from those two former governors, just a short list of prominent Republicans – including former Trump administration senior officials William Barr and John Bolton, and Senate Minority Whip John Thune – have pushed back at all against Trump’s claim that he is being hunted by “lunatic,” “deranged” and “Marxist” prosecutors, or publicly expressed misgivings about the underlying behavior detailed in the federal indictment against him.

By refusing to confront Trump or his enraged defenders more directly, the Republicans who want the party to move beyond him in 2024 may be stitching their own straitjacket. The nearly indivisible GOP defense of Trump has once again created a situation in which a controversy that is weakening Trump with the broader electorate is strengthening his position inside the GOP coalition. [Continue reading…]