Mark Leibovich, in something of a “hall of faith cowardice” for the Grand Old Party:
He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.
“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”
Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.
[…]
After Trump won the nomination in 2016, “The party defines the party” became a familiar feckless refrain among the GOP’s putative leaders. House Speaker Paul Ryan vowed to me that he would “protect conservatism from being disfigured.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the radio host Hugh Hewitt that “Trump is not going to change the institution,” referring to the GOP. “He’s not going to change the basic philosophy of the party.”
In retrospect, this was hilarious.
Hilarious, of course, because it was pure bullshit. As I’ve been learning, over and over and over again for the last decade-plus, it’s all been steeped in bullshit from the beginning. They were just better at controlling it and hiding it (even from themselves) before someone truly shameless came along and showed them — or showed the rest of the world, anyway — just how little control, and even less integrity, they really have.