Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine: “One of the rationalizations Republicans have made for their party’s refusal to disavow Donald Trump’s authoritarianism is that asking a party to renounce a former president is categorically unreasonable. ‘He’s an ex-president. You can’t just excommunicate him,’ pleads Representative Dan Crenshaw. ‘People in their parties would also have thrown out people openly critical of Obama and Bush,’ says Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini. Parties don’t just disown their former presidents, right? Actually, it has happened. The Republican Party excommunicated George H.W. Bush after his 1992 defeat. That episode was a seminal moment in the formation of the party’s modern identity, and the contrast between its gleeful abandonment of the 41st president and continued fealty to the 45th one reveals a great deal.

“In 1990, Bush faced a rising budget deficit that was pushing up interest rates and threatening the recovery. Democrats, who controlled Congress, insisted that any deficit deal impose shared sacrifice on the rich (who had disproportionately benefited from the Reagan tax cuts that had largely caused the deficit). Bush had campaigned against any new taxes but had no choice but to compromise. The price he paid – a tiny increase in the top tax rate, from 28 percent to 31 percent – was small in comparison with the spending cuts he secured, which were in fact one of the toughest austerity measures ever enacted… When a Republican president had actually violated a core tenet of conservative belief, his fellow partisans knew what to do about it. They shunned him, turned his name into a synonym for ‘loser,’ and forced even his children to denounce him. The difference is that Bush had committed a truly unforgivable sin: agreeing to increase the top tax rate by three percentage points. Trump won’t be purged because he committed what is, in the eyes of the conservative movement, a more forgivable sin: fomenting the violent overthrow of the government in order to seize an unelected second term.”