Like many of his colleagues, the aide expressed profound annoyance when I asked him if there would ever come a time when Republicans turn on Trump. “What does that even mean? What do you expect us to do?” he replied. “I hear this with every little Tweet [from Trump]: ‘Oh, when are Republicans going to put an end to this?’ What do you want us to do, seize his Twitter account?” The best that can be hoped for from congressional Republicans, he argued, is transparency. “When Trump does something we disagree with, we’ll disagree with him. When Trump’s interests align with ours, we’ll work with him. That’s the situation we’re in.”…
They were willing to allow for the possibility that some Trump campaign officials might have inappropriately cooperated with Russians, but they said the president and his team were simply too incompetent to pull off a high-level House of Cards-style conspiracy. At worst, they seemed to believe Team Trump’s collusion amounted to a “conspiracy of dunces” (as a recent Ross Douthat column termed it)—embarrassing and unseemly, sure, but certainly not so grave as to demand blowing up the entire GOP agenda to address it.
“I think most of us agree that if something did happen, it wasn’t anything malicious … it’s just chalked up to [Trump and his advisers] not being very smart,” one senior Senate aide told me.
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