What Impeachment Won't Change: How the GOP Became the Party of Trump Over Several Decades

 https://time.com/5928937/trumpism-deeply-rooted-republican-party/

The Trump presidency was a product, not the cause, of the new Republican Party. President Trump’s success was only possible because of the transformation that the party underwent since the 1980s. So deeply rooted is the dysfunction that shapes the GOP that even the shock and awe of a presidentially incited mob storming Capitol Hill won’t fundamentally shift what the party is all about.
 While it is true that Democrats and Republicans have moved further apart, with the number of moderates having vastly diminished, the GOP has become much more radicalized than the Democrats. As a whole, Republicans have shifted further to the right than Democrats, as a whole, have moved to the left. Just as important, Republicans have embraced a much more extreme approach to partisan warfare, proving more willing to damage institutions and shatter norms than their opponents. Democrats come prepared for a pillow fight, as Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon argued, Republicans for the head wound.