What these Republicans care about is prevailing against their opponents, period. Accusing these GOP voters of double standards is beside the point. It’s true that if any Democratic president had been accused of even one-tenth of the charges swirling around Trump, Republicans would be calling for blood. But what does it prove to point this out? That Republicans are hypocrites? Sure they are. Proudly. They hate it when their enemies break norms and laws, and they love it when their on teammates do the same thing. That’s the mindset of someone willing to fight dirty. That’s what they think it takes to win.

Pundits know that Republican voters view the world this way, because they confront evidence for it every single day. Yet they seem incapable of adjusting their analytical frames to take its implications into account. No matter how many times a revelation about Trump’s awfulness fails to produce a collapse in his support, the next one raises the same hope that this will be the one that finally does him in…

If a Democratic majority in the House voted to impeach the president, that would be big news, but Trump would almost certainly respond with relentless attacks on those behind the effort. That would likely buoy his own-party support. And the resulting trial in the Senate? Unless Democrats make the impossible happen in the midterms and end up winning the 67 seats required to convict and remove the president (an event that has never occurred in the whole of American history), Trump would be acquitted.