Republicans cannot shake their harmful Trump addiction

For most of my life, I was a bigger supporter of the U.S. Republicans than of my own party, the British Conservatives. The two parties were similar in many ways, but Tories had a weakness for hierarchy, deference, and tradition, while Republicans struck me as radicals and individualists, heirs to Tom Paine rather than Edmund Burke.

Former President Donald Trump was painfully at odds with the philosophy of the GOP — a party to which he had come late and opportunistically. Where his predecessors had sought to limit government, he liked to mobilize the full resources of the state against people who crossed him.