Politico reports:

For a moment, it looked like Donald Trump might be losing his iron grip on the GOP. In the wake of the deadly Capitol riot, 10 House Republicans joined Democrats in their vote to impeach him. Several other Republicans openly suggested at least censuring the president.

Not anymore.

Local and state Republican parties are censuring Republicans for disloyalty in states across the country. The lawmakers who broke with him are weathering a storm of criticism from Trump-adoring constituents at home, with punitive primary challenges already taking shape. In Washington, party leaders who once suggested Trump bore some responsibility for the Jan. 6 violence are backtracking.

On Tuesday, 45 Republican senators — all but five members of the GOP conference — voted that putting a former president on trial for impeachment is unconstitutional, all but guaranteeing the Senate won’t convict him. If the Republican Party seemed to be at a crossroads about its post-Trump future, it now appears to have concluded in which direction to travel.

“There is a level of support for this president more than during the election,” said Don Thrasher, chair of Kentucky’s Nelson County Republican Party, which recently voted to censure minority leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentuckian, for what Thrasher called “impugning the president’s honor” in debate over certifying the election results.

Of the post-presidential fervor for Trump, he said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The devotion to Trump, however, comes at great expense. The party risks tying its future to a one-term president whose deeply polarizing style cost the party both the House and the Senate during his four years in office. And he blew a hole in the party’s suburban foundation that might be irreparable. [Continue reading…]