There was no stopping Trump without fighting his election lies.
Incumbent presidents who are running for reelection almost always win the nomination. Why? Because they won last time, and parties like nominating winners. Defeated candidates who run for the nomination usually lose. Why? Because they lost last time, and parties hate nominating losers.
If Republicans wanted their party to nominate somebody other than Donald Trump — and most of the party’s elected officials and donors did, at least secretly — then they needed their voters to understand that he lost the 2020 election. But doing so required hard steps they were never willing to take.
The outbreak of conscientiousness that swept through the Republican Party after January 6, 2021 gave way like a fever. One week after the insurrection, Axios reported that Republicans were “divided whether to do it with one quick kill via impeachment, or let him slowly fade away.” The framing of the question answered itself: Why take on the risk of fighting Trump and alienating his supporters when he would simply go away on his own?
The party was divided over Trump’s election lies and coup attempt, but the divide had an asymmetric quality. One faction was obsessed with litigating its beliefs and repeating them endlessly, while the opposing faction only wanted the issue to go away. The outcome of this one-sided argument was inevitable. The percentage of Republicans who believed Trump has steadily risen.
All these mental contortions on the right are an attempt to foist responsibility for Trump’s hold on the Republican Party to external forces. The unavoidable reality is that if Republicans wanted a different nominee, they needed to convince their base the last nominee actually lost. Doing that would have created a fissure within the coalition and caused short-term political pain. So they stumbled on, hoping to paper over the division and keep the coalition intact at all costs. And here we are. They won’t even begin the process of changing anything until they admit they did this to themselves.