Just two months after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol — even as some Republicans harbored illusions about moving beyond Donald Trump — Sen. Lindsey Graham stepped forward with a reality check.

The South Carolina Republican likened the Trump-era GOP to a hostage situation and urged his party to make the best of its captivity.

“He could make the Republican Party something that nobody else I know can make it. He can make it bigger. He can make it stronger. He can make it more diverse,” Graham told “Axios on HBO.” Then the senator added: “And he also could destroy it.”

Graham said Trump both had a “dark side” and was capable of “magic” — and that it was best to hope the party got the magic.

Tuesday’s elections proved how right Graham was — even as the GOP is decidedly staring down the perils of a historically unpopular president’s dark side.

Five months ago, Indiana state Senate Republicans delivered perhaps the most stunning rebuke of Trump to date from members of his own party. They called into question his domination of the party by firmly rejecting his new congressional map — and his pronounced threats over it.

But on Tuesday, Trump successfully sanctioned their apostasy.

Trump and his political operation unseated at least five of seven state senators they had targeted for voting against that map. (One primary race remains unresolved. One senator survived.)

The significance of those defeats shouldn’t be understated. Most lawmakers never have to worry about losing a general election in today’s polarized age, which makes primaries their only real hurdle to reelection. Trump has used this fact to great effect. He’s enforced loyalty by making life hell for any Republican who runs afoul of him, and he’s ushered plenty of them out the door — often via forced retirement.

Tuesday showed that even a politically diminished Trump still has the juice to end a Republican’s career if they don’t toe his line.

“Sometimes you can vote your feelings, but sometimes you need to vote with the party,” James Blair, a top Trump political adviser, told CNN’s Dana Bash on Wednesday. “As the elected party leader, the president gets to decide which vote is which, and he is always clear and up-front about it. Nobody should be surprised about any of this.”

And that message won’t be lost on Republicans who might have thought, like some did after January 6, that the paradigm had shifted. They’ll continue to live in fear of him.

But while this is great news for Trump’s political capital, it is decidedly less great news for a GOP whose midterm hopes the president is sinking.

In any normal midterm year where the president had an approval rating sinking into the mid-30s, you’d see lawmakers tripping over themselves to create some distance from him and trying to adjust the party’s political course. Think George W. Bush in 2006 and 2008; he and his vice president didn’t even attend the 2008 Republican National Convention.

But Republicans are doing quite the opposite, because they feel they must to survive.

Perhaps nothing drives this home like Trump’s ballroom.

This issue is a political albatross for the GOP and has been for six months. It’s emblematic of Trump’s politically bizarre insistence on slapping his name and likeness all over Washington and building fancy things, even as Americans see him neglecting their cost-of-living concerns.

But over the past week, Republicans haven’t just humored the project; they’ve embraced it. Graham and others proposed making taxpayers pay for it (despite Trump’s promises that taxpayers would pay nothing). And now Senate Republicans have slipped $1 billion into an unrelated bill to shore up security for the ballroom.

This would seem to be political malpractice six months before the midterms, but Trump demands it. That’s why we’ve seen some politically safe lawmakers use the issue to curry favor with the president — even though it could work against their more vulnerable brethren.

The Iran war — and Trump’s haphazard approach to it — presents similar dynamics.

On Tuesday, he sent out his secretaries of defense and state and the chairman of his Joint Chiefs of Staff to detail and espouse the supposed strategic brilliance of “Project Freedom,” the questionable effort to try to guide ships through the logjammed Strait of Hormuz amid Iranian threats. But then, mere hours later, Trump said the project was paused as he yet again suggested a peace deal could be near.

Trump has suggested a deal was close many times before, but it’s yet to arrive and the details of what it could entail remain scant. He’s also repeatedly bluffed. So it’s possible this is merely the latest head-scratching strategic moment in a war that is fast becoming a major liability for Trump and the GOP.

Polling last week showed 61% of Americans labeled the war a mistake after just two months; the Iraq war took three years for the “mistake” number to reach that high, and the Vietnam war took six.

But through it all, congressional Republicans have demonstrated vanishingly little interest in asserting their constitutional powers to rein in Trump’s war powers — or in at least trying to convince the White House to change course. Most of them seem paralyzed, as if they have no choice.

And Tuesday showed why they feel that way.

So it appears most of the GOP will keep pushing Trump’s highly unpopular ballroom and his highly unpopular war.

They’ll excuse his attacks on a highly popular American pope and legitimize his legal retribution campaign, which  Americans appear to view rather dimly.

They’ll scramble to draw him more GOP congressional districts, even though some new districts could backfire on the party and result in marginal gains in 2026 — not nearly enough to beat back an increasingly likely blue wave.

None of it appears to be doing Republicans any political favors in the midterms, but it’s what Trump demands, so they do it.

Because what else is a hostage to do?

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