Perry Bacon Jr. of FiveThirtyEight –
Americans opposed to President Trump are constantly asking some version of this question: “Why won’t Republicans break with Trump?”
In a sane world, the reaction of Republicans to the “memorandum of telephone conversation” between President Trump and the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, combined with the whistle-blower complaint filed by an intelligence officer describing a White House cover-up, would be similar to the response of Republicans after the release, on Aug. 5, 1974, of the “smoking gun” tape that finally broke the Nixon presidency. Republicans would begin to abandon Mr. Trump, with senior figures urging him in private and in public to resign.
This may be asking too much of Republicans, who have lost their way in the Trump era.
