An important divide has arrived on the right in the immediate aftermath of the election over how far to go in following Donald Trump, and how far people are willing to go to destroy others who don’t follow along. At the heart of the divide is a gap between those triangulating for a future without Trump and those who are refusing to imagine one…
The MAGA diehards’ efforts to throw out the election will be futile. But their influence on the Trump-supporting base is important, and affects both the future of the conservative media and the way the Republican Party will handle Trump’s most adoring fans going forward. Trump’s supporters have spent the last four years being told that the president is the victim of a huge conspiracy to undermine him, and many will never believe that this election was legitimate — a fact that hasn’t been lost on Republicans deciding how to react to this crisis. The closest parallel could be to the Tea Party a decade ago, a movement fueled by hard-right conservative media that demanded ideological purity from establishment Republicans and threatened their seats in Congress.
The fragmentation of conservative media has empowered the loudest voices calling to “stop the steal,” and weakened any possibility that reality will intrude on those who are consuming their news through the hodge-podge of fringe sources popular on the Trump right these days.
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