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The death sentence, put in a brief statement of facts

“If you want to spend all your time going on Fox and be[ing] an asshole, there’s never been a better time to serve,” said Republican strategist Corry Bliss, a longtime adviser to Portman. “But if you want to spend all your time being thoughtful and getting shit done, there’s never been a worse time to serve.”

GOP has no longer an identity, and it has only itself to blame.

From opposing conviction in his impeachment trial to a surprise Senate Republican retirement, the GOP establishment anticipates a Trumpian future.

Much of this column’s analysis since the Capitol riots on Jan. 6 has anticipated there will be an explicit break within the Republican Party between the pragmatic institutionalists and the Trump-aligned kraken wing. The coalition of convenience between the two sides, held together by the former president’s power in office, looked untenable without the benefits that the alliance provided.

But over the ensuing weeks, an alternate reality has emerged, one where Republican leaders simply do nothing as they fear a grassroots backlash against showing any kind of principle. Call it a strategy of benign neglect—what conservative Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson calls a case of “collective amnesia” towards the growing extremism within the GOP’s ranks.

Senate Republicans are now finding reasons not to convict Trump in next month’s Senate impeachment trial (all but five voted Tuesday to dismiss it as unconstitutional), as they absorb polling showing Republican voters still sticking with the former president. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has gone wishy-washy in his support of leadership partner Liz Cheney, one of the 10 House Republicans to vote for impeachment. Most of those 10 lawmakers who stood up for democratic values are facing the likelihood of tough primaries next year. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a likely 2024 presidential contender, is a telling bellwether for this political moment. The day after the attack, she said Trump would be “judged harshly by history.” As the political winds shifted, she went on Fox News to rail against Trump’s impeachment, calling on Democrats “to give the man a break.”

Sen. Rob Portman’s surprising retirement announcement Monday, despite previously indicating plans to run for reelection, put the capstone on the GOP’s acquiescence to Trumpism. While Portman cited partisan gridlock as driving his decision, the reality is that his bipartisan instincts and genial tone were increasingly out of step in a party defined by grievance. Even though Portman was favored to win a third term, he would have faced political pressure to toe the party line in the runup to next year’s primary. Portman’s decision now creates a wide-open Senate race in a Trump-friendly battleground that will speak volumes about the direction of the Republican Party.

And thus, I got and answer to my previous question: if the Democrats want to do something, bipartisanship does not matter, the bottom line results will. The Republicans made it not matter anymore, they became a fractured party, without an coherent ideology.

It's not the first time it happened to them. Last time it was the "Tea Party" pseudo-party, which had no idea of what they wanted, just what they didn't want (actually what David and Charles Koch didn't want). When money that created the "movement" dried out, GOP shed out all the ideas and the candidates from the Tea Party.

Except that now the opportunistic GOP splinter is much larger. And they aren't supported by some dry ideology that needs to be pushed by money to stay present in the mind of the voters, there's an incarnation of the identity in Trump's person. As vacuous as that may be, that presence doesn't go away.
I bet if nothing happens to make his voting base turn off him (like making him disgusting as a human being in their eyes) he will sell rallies for the 2022 primaries. And he'll ask both money and allegiance.

GOP has had two big occasions the keep their identity: the week immediate after the election and the Jan 6. This assuming they had an identity to begin with, but I suspect that was and is their problem - were they to have had one, they wouldn't need Trump.

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So were does this leaves the Democrats? Well, to be successful, they need to do things. Shouldn't be even too hard: getting control on Covid by Sept 2021 and growing the economy afterwards for 2-3 quarters.
Maybe just publicly showing that there's no "China Joe" and they are not "the corporatist establishment" but side with Joe Average.

Shouldn't be a hard thing to do, if they will keep focus on doing the job. Go through the moves, but let the "bipartisanship" aside, those don't matter bottom-line for getting the job done. Don't waste time with things that aren't on the critical path, like antagonizing the corpse that GOP has become - it will only create noise and detract the focus (both their focus on the job and the public's focus from the reality).

If they succeed, the 2028 Trump will be 82 years old, in a much worse health condition than Joe Biden is. Probably the Dems will start to splinter themselves along the way, after 2024, and create a leftier left, bringing the US political spectrum closer to the rest of the world. If they try before that, the things will get really unpredictable and chaotic.

If the Dems fail, then the Americans will need to get used to not being exceptional anymore.

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Aaaand... the Dems start to take aim at their foot.
House Dems move to yoke GOP to QAnon
WTF? Aren't they able to defined themselves other than "We're not QAnon/GOP"?