Even as Robert Mueller’s investigation accelerates, there are few signs that the party has any will to resist him. In the last year and a half, Trump has succeeded in moving the window of acceptability in our politics, especially on the right. The collaborators rationalize their response thus: if they did not go along, then power would shift to even worse actors. As the former presidential aide Steve Bannon plots a populist revanchist rebellion, some Republicans tell themselves that it is better to be a Vichy Republican, a quiescent enabler, than one of the denizens of Bannon’s Crazytown.

Even the Trumpists, though, sense that they cannot control the forces they have unleashed. They nurtured an alligator in the bathtub; now it is grown and loose and still quite angry. Republicans are now competing with one another for who is to be eaten last.

Republicans knew that this could happen, of course, but they decided to make their Faustian bargain anyway. Surrender to Trump meant accepting the unacceptable, but they reasoned it would be worth it if they got conservative judges, tax cuts, and the repeal of Obamacare. The question they must grapple with is: What is the butcher’s bill for this bargain? So far, they’ve been willing to pay it in a series of escalating self-humiliations.