The neoconservatives who proudly announced that they would vote for Biden in 2020 because they put “country over party”, now await smugly in their splendid palace of principle for the rest of the Republicans, having come to their senses, to slink shamefully back, asking for guidance. But they wait in vain. Mainstream Republican voters, even if they don’t especially love Trump, embrace the program of the new GOP: no new wars, law and order, an end to Wokeness in public schools, and sensible pro-family policies that don’t include intentional immiseration of the middle class through exponentially inflated energy costs.

But that doesn’t mean the Bush-Cheney-Romney cohort will disappear. They can still make noise and wave their tattered battle flags, even threatening to mount rear-guard challenges at national conventions. Dick Cheney, in a cartoonish commercial in support of his daughter’s campaign, glowered at the camera, insisting that “there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump”. But “our republic”, like “our democracy”, must always be heard with a stress on the possessive: when Cheney or Pelosi say “our” they mean theirs. Trump’s threat to established power is less ideological than proprietary.