Jonathan Chait: “On the evening of January 6, after a Trumpist mob had stormed the Capitol, Senator Lindsey Graham stood on the Senate floor and finally detached himself from the president he had so obediently served: ‘Count me out, enough is enough.’ But the thing about Lindsey Graham running away is that he always comes back. After his brief and apparently unpleasant experience with independence, Graham has returned to his familiar, comfortable place at Trump’s feet. ‘I think he’s going to be a viable leader of the Republican Party,’ he gushes. ‘He’s very popular. And he’s going to get acquitted.'”

“Graham might be the most overtly comic illustration of his party’s turnabout on impeachment, but he is also perfectly representative of its dominant faction. The post-Trump GOP is split three ways. The party’s tiny, small-d democratic wing on its left has fully broken with the authoritarian former president (Representative Adam Kinzinger continues to urge conviction). The party’s far-right wing, with members like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, is sinking deeper into the Trump personality cult. In the middle are the soft authoritarians, whose initial and genuine revulsion at the violent insurrection has given way to weary cynicism. As they have worked through their feelings, first rebelling against Trump and then suppressing their own rebellion, they have redirected their anger away from Trump and toward the Democrats. Trump’s actions may have been wrong, even impeachable, but it is also wrong for Democrats to try to impeach him. Their curious reasoning is that, since Republicans won’t vote to convict Trump, impeachment won’t punish him. The soft authoritarian Republicans consider their unwillingness to break with Trump and offend his voters a fixed and nonnegotiable fact of political life. Forcing them to confront Trump’s crimes therefore serves no purpose other than embarrassing them.”