I'm honestly not sure how we can survive as a democracy when one of the two political parties behaves like this. The post-Reagan GOP made a decision to embrace a set of governing policies that don't make sense; they don't comport with reality. Massive tax cuts don't work the way they say they do. Climate change is real. Poverty and inequality are corroding our nation. People don't like moral busybodies telling them how to live. They can't "do" health care.
It has gotten to the point where Trump isn't the outlier that some Republicans want you to believe he is. He is, in fact, a perfect arbiter of the state of the contemporary GOP. Some of them get that. But the herd mentality that exists in both parties exists on an order of magnitude greater in the GOP. Democrats have clustered together around certain policies just because the Blue Team supports them. What is unique about the GOP is that are perfectly comfortable arguing against objective, factual, measurable reality.
Some of this can be seen in Josh Marshall's new "Trump Razor." Trump and those in his orbit see everything as a media strategy. They have thrived off the chaos of the modern media environment and that chaos derives from the idea that anything is up for debate among screaming panels on CNN.
I don't know how we can have a functioning political system unless the GOP's fevered madness is broken, and that can only happen with a wave election the likes of which we haven't seen.
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