"Trump had put countless Republican lawmakers in excruciating political predicaments. Senator John McCain, who told me last summer that Trump had “fired up the crazies,” now needs Trump’s voters to support his own reëlection in Arizona—a state that Trump won by twenty-two percentage points in the primaries—and has said that he will support him. Marco Rubio, whose last days as a Presidential candidate were spent mocking the size of Trump’s hands and the orange hue of his face, recently apologized for the personal attacks, and said that he would speak on Trump’s behalf at the Convention. Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, another of Trump’s opponents early in the campaign, has transformed himself into a sort of manservant, who is constantly with Trump at events. (One Republican told me that a friend of his on the Trump campaign used Snapchat to send him a video of Christie fetching Trump’s McDonald’s order.)...
If there was a single moment when the Party of Paul Ryan began to turn into the Party of Donald Trump, it may have been July 10, 2013, the day House Republicans held a special meeting in the basement of the Capitol to debate whether they should take up immigration reform.
Paul Ryan stood before one microphone and Tom Cotton, a thirty-six-year-old freshman congressman from Arkansas, stood before another. Ryan, who spoke first, argued for passing a version of the Senate bill, saying that reforming the immigration system would strengthen the economy, supplying U.S. companies with a steady number of immigrants to take jobs that other Americans didn’t want. Cotton, who is tall and scrawny and loves partisan combat, delivered an unexpectedly sharp rebuke. He told me that he condemned the Senate bill for giving priority to “the illegal immigrant population” over the plight of “natural-born citizens and naturalized citizens who are out of work” and warned his colleagues that Republican voters were against immigration reform. Cotton was eying a Senate seat in deep-red Arkansas, where voters were strongly opposed to it. He led the House opposition to the Senate bill, and Boehner, then the Speaker, decided not to bring the bill to the House floor...
Most Republicans could not imagine supporting a Democrat. “But, by the same token, trying to imagine supporting Donald Trump—a Donald Trump that doesn’t back away from some of the positions that he’s taken—I can’t fathom that, either,” Flake said."
The convention will be fascinating, and the aftermath in the next few years when there is the time and space to reckon with the dissatisfaction.
FB: "Many of his colleagues see Trump as “a lesser-of-two-evils choice,” Sasse said. “I think if it’s merely a lesser of two evils then the American experiment has already lost. We live in a civic republic, and you have to be recognizing that voting is also an act of signalling about the ideal, about what America should be in twenty-five years. I don’t want more candidates like Donald Trump. So I can’t vote for him just because he’s not Hillary Clinton.”"
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