Republicans have become the except-when-Trump-does-it party

In that regard, I found interviews in the Miami Herald with Florida’s two senators, both Republicans and both ostensibly staunch proponents of free trade, particularly instructive about the political domination Trump has, for now, over his party. “Everything has been tried, every carrot available has been tried,” Marco Rubio, the senator who ran against Trump in 2016 as a fervent free-trader, and who first became nationally famous for trying to negotiate a bipartisan agreement on immigration reform during the Obama Administration, told the Herald. “I’m not a tariff fan in terms of a normal course of policy but I know of no other method to get [Mexico’s] attention.” Florida’s other senator, the newly elected former governor Rick Scott, offered a similar rationale. “I don’t like tariffs but I’m going to support the president because I believe Mexico could be a better partner,” Scott told the newspaper. “They need to figure out how to reduce the number of people who are being apprehended at the border.”

In other words, they are against tariffs—except when Trump imposes them. Which strikes me as a perfect rationale for this political moment. They are also presumably against stonewalling investigators, refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas, shutting down the government, running up the national debt, labelling close American allies national-security threats, and praising dictators—except when Trump does it. So far, this has been the story of the Republican Senate in the Trump era and, indeed, of the national G.O.P. At a time when no one is really sure anymore just what constitutes Republican ideology, you could do worse than to call it the Except-When-Trump-Does-It Party.

For Republicans, Trump now trumps all. Even D Day, said the Party’s national chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, should be an occasion to praise and acclaim the President.