Republicans could and did game the system during Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, marginalizing and even neutralizing the Constitution's impeachment clause. They voted with one exception to let the 45th president skate on his quite evident abuse of presidential power to serve himself. They could ignore his heavy-handed, obstructionist tactics. But the GOP could not prevent him from treating his acquittal as a license to kill. Nor could the GOP prevent Americans from noticing more and more that the wealthy, right-wing power structure has been propping up not a master deal maker, not a wise statesman, and certainly not a self-described "stable genius."
Thanks in part to the daily recounting of his misdeeds as in his final year illuminated by the arc light of impeachment, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the coronavirus epidemic, more and more voters are, as polling indicates, coming to see that the Republican Party is protecting a venal, misogynistic, bullying, ignorant, narcissistic, manipulative, lying son of a bastard whose faults add up to epic assholery.
As the Urban Dictionary explains, "asshole" is shorthand for an "inconsiderate, arrogant, uncaring, selfish, borderline sadistic, apathetic, mean, spiteful, dishonorable, bastard of a man who could tempt the Pope into a fight." And that's how an embarrassed, angry and motivated public increasingly is seeing this hollow president.
We are of course stuck with perhaps 20 percent of voters who in various combinations are cynical, weary, apathetic schadenfreudians. They enable faux-populist authoritarians like Trump, and GOP vote suppression tactics do the rest. Luckily, many Americans remain decent, kind people invested in fair play and a sense of justice. These Americans still respect soft-spoken, humble demeanor fortified by genuine achievement -- without bombast, private intrigue, self-aggrandizement, or a winner-versus-losers mentality.
That's why the weight of the voting majority is likely to feed the political black hole that is Trump, but only in the sense of trapping him under his own weight. Trumpism is now absorbing the entire party he attracted to himself after his hostile takeover. He's the rotten core from which enlightenment itself cannot escape. The rest of the GOP is quickly being pulled in, locked down forever by the near-irresistible gravity of his flaws. Too late they seek to break their fall; trump’s gaping maw now hungrily drags them down.
For three years, perhaps, Republicans still had a chance to reverse thrust and escape, and lately they have tried kicking in the warp engines, just like Trump. But the party now has crossed the one-way event horizon of American politics. Nothing can stop the Republican Party’s accelerating free-fall into a singularity of doom and utter obscurity.
Wispy, disorganized remnants of Republicanism will of course persist as the violent death spiral throws off random bursts of incoherent energy and heated gases. But for all practical purposes the party will be gone, sucked into a single infinitesimal point of super-dense political nothingness.
And so we will be rid of this voracious, unnatural and destructive force — at least until the arrival of the next crude, bloated, megastar politician, another Trump who is unable to perceive much less understand events beyond a purely personal horizon. There will be peace for a time, but the cosmic battle between good and evil is never over.