“I’m unaware of any Republican primary where the organizing principle that Trump is a bad guy was ever successful,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a close Trump ally in Congress who had been campaigning against Cheney since days after her impeachment vote, told Vox. “Republicans might have squeaked through who were not pro-Trump, but those candidates had some other organizing principle. Liz Cheney didn’t, and that’s why she lost so badly.”

Even an ardent Never Trumper like Tim Miller, a former top Republican operative and author of a recent New York Times bestseller, Why We Did It, conceded that Trump won the battle for the soul of the GOP. “A lot of people misunderstand what is happening in this moment and think the Republican Party might somehow go back to being the party of Liz Cheney and Paul Ryan,” Miller said. “It’s never going back — at least not any time on the horizon.”…

As one plugged-in Trump ally who was granted anonymity in order to speak frankly put it, “Cheney found out what happens when you try to make an entire election a referendum on Trump.” The Trump ally was skeptical that there was ever a path for Cheney to win, but thought she could have kept it close by “running a hyper-localized campaign, not going out of the way to mention Trump’s name, [and] not publicly aligning with the January 6 committee.”