Do what Donald says or you’re out

“Alaska needs Mike Dunleavy as Governor now more than ever. He has my Complete and Total Endorsement but, this endorsement is subject to his non-endorsement of Senator Lisa Murkowski who has been very bad for Alaska. In other words, if Mike endorses her, which is his prerogative, my endorsement of him is null and void, and of no further force or effect!”

Again, this is not satire. This is not parody. This is the ranting of the actual Leader of All Republicanism, Now And Forever as he descends into whatever fresh levels of narcissistic decompensation he and his aides can cooperatively invent. Donald is only willing to endorse you with a set of legal terms and conditions: Do you accept? Please indicate here that you have read them all, Mr. Dunleavy. Your Trumpism account cannot be activated unless you agree.

For anyone who doesn’t remember—and bless you, really—Sen. Lisa Murkowski committed the gravest possible sin against Donald. Donald is going to be brooding over it every hour of every day until he either dies or sinks into a Big Mac coma. Murkowski was a yes vote to impeach Trump after Trump orchestrated the arrival of a violent mob bent on killing Republican and Democratic lawmakers rather than abiding Trump’s removal of power. Yes, Donald finally did something that a bare handful of top Republicans were willing to agree was not something a United States pretzeldent should do—what with the attempted murder an all—and the delusional psychopath will never, ever, ever forgive it. So now everybody who’s ever so much as nodded in Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s direction has to enter a fake contract with Dear Leader promising that they’ll have nothing more to do with her.

Because, and I cannot stress this enough, Republicanism is run by a broken-brained madman.

If there was any courage in Republicanism, just the barest hint of a spine anywhere in the whole body poly-tick, Dunleavy would swiftly tell Donald to pound Florida sand. The whole premise of modern Republicanism is being a strong, preening, and toxic manly-man, and there’s nothing manly-man about a Republican governor meekly bowing to a demand that he follow a golf-cart-scuttling retiree’s napkin notes on who he’s allowed to be friends with.

For a party so supposedly obsessed with rebelling against authority, it remains pretty damn odd that you’re not allowed to so much as exist within the party if you’re not willing to abide by the weird orange dude’s every uttered burp. It feels like Trump could easily be supplanted as American fascism’s leader by literally anyone willing to stand up and mock him as an incompetent twit, showing the emperor to have no clothes; Trump, on the other hand, has spent the last four years of his life sending minions after anyone in the party who he even suspected might be capable of such a thing.

So it’s a near-certainty Dunleavy will go along with this. He has to. If he was the sort of person to have any guts at all, he would have cut Trump loose after the whole “attempted to overthrow the government” thing.